Vantage construal in the attributive use of basic color terms: the ACN and N of NC constructions

The article presents a usage-based analysis of color attribution, i.e. the construal of the relation between color property and an entity to which it is attributed in painting descriptions. The study is based on the corpus of 100 catalog entries written for American art museums. It focuses on the two most frequent morpho-syntactic patterns in the attributive use of basic color terms – ACN and N of NC – where the color concept surfaces either as an adjective or a noun. Drawing on a number of studies in the Vantage Theory framework ( MacLaury, 1997, MacLaury, 2002, MacLaury, 2003 and Taylor, 2003), the morpho-syntactic variation in the color word usage is interpreted in terms of alternative vantage construal. The two patterns exhibit features comparable to those described for dominant and recessive vantages in color categorization, and are analyzed as two vantages in the construal of color attribution as an atemporal relation. Thus, the study attempts to apply Vantage Theory, originally developed for modeling color categorization at the lexeme level, to more complex attributive constructions.