The symbolic value of colors in the folk imaginary: a contrastive analysis of idiomatic meaning in Catalan and Spanish

Each language has the capacity to organise a certain conceptualisation of the lexical field dealing with colours according to the geographical, historical and cultural circumstances of its corresponding linguistic community. Thus, the aim of this paper is to identify the distinctive features that Catalan and Spanish use to connote colours symbolically in their respective folk traditions. To this end, this study has carried out a contrastive analysis of set phrases and idioms has been carried out based on an epistemological perspective often used in cognitive linguistics and ethnopoetics.