I colori in russo: questioni di sfumature

This work aims at exploring Russian colour naming by a web-based experiment. 71 participants were asked to name the colours of 39 photographic images, for the total amount of 2747 answers. The collected answers have been classified both on the semantic and on the syntactic level. We adopted Rich’s typologization of colour terms (Rich 1977) adding to it some other few tags in order to classify compounds and derived terms (all marked by the suffix -ovat), whose investigation is one of the main purposes of this work. On a morpho-syntactic level, this work proposes a classification for compounds, syntactic compounds and multiword expressions considering factors like the type of grammatical relationship between the two members of the compound, the head position, the inflectional morphemes eventually marking the colour terms and some graphic elements (e.g. hyphen).