I termini di colore nell’area BRUNO-MARRONE in italiano: sincronia e diacronia

After the publication in 1969 of Berlin and Kay’s Basic color terms. Their universality and evolution, trying to answer the question whether the number of basic colour terms could be higher than eleven has been a frequent challenge for studies on colour vocabulary in individual languages. The debated status of the Russian terms sinij ‘dark blue’ and goluboj ‘light blue’ ignited an interesting discussion among linguists, psychologists and anthropologists, and stimulated a vast number of specific studies focused on the BLUE, RED and BROWN areas in several languages. The availability of new lexicographic resources and of large and searchable corpora now makes it possible to deepen the study of the distribution of the nearest counterparts of brown in Italian, i.e., bruno, marrone, castano and moro, from both a diachronic and a synchronic perspective. Our study focuses on changes in the semantic relations between these terms from Old Italian to Present-day Italian. We also dwell on their eligibility as bases for derived and compound colour terms.