The Hungarian colour terms piros and vörös : A corpus and cognitive linguistic account

A number of studies have been written on the Hungarian colour terms piros and vörös, both denoting ‘red’, focusing on either one of the following questions: 1) disambiguating the meanings of the two terms; or 2) their status in Hungarian as basic colour terms. The present paper attempts to resolve these issues in one go by adopting a combined approach of corpus and cognitive linguistics. The paper makes the following three hypotheses: 1) as vörös had more time to undergo idiomatization, there will be significant differences and systematic trends between the type/token ratios of the two terms; 2) piros is a more generic term used for a larger and looser range of concepts, while vörös is associated with a more limited range of concepts, and 3) piros is mostly used in its primary, literal sense, while vörös is more inclined to be used in a figurative sense. After a thorough corpus and cognitive linguistic analysis of data extracted from the updated Hungarian National Corpus, the paper comes to the general conclusion that vörös is not a basic colour term of Hungarian.