We first look at the frequency and usage of the words colour(s)/(ed) in Thomas’s poems. This analysis leads to the hypothesis that the poet uses colour as an essential element in the natural and emotional world. The chapter then presents a table showing the complete frequency data for each colour word, for every poem containing at least one. The frequency ordering is green > black > white > gold(en) > red > blue > yellow, brown > grey, silver > scarlet, emerald > ochre, crimson, stammel. The total number of colour occurrences is 223. The total number of lines of poetry is 3004, so the mean number of colour words per 100 lines is 3004/223 = 7.42. Of the 93 poems, 59 (63.4%) contain at least one instance of a colour word. A further table breaks the occurrences down into the colour term categories presented in Chap. 3 and draws conclusions relating to the relative frequencies of the classes of colour terms. We then go on to compare Thomas’s colour word usage with that described in Steinvall’s (English Colour Terms in Context. Modern Language Institute, Umeå University, 2002) study of colour vocabulary in the Bank of English corpus. Statistical analysis shows that the two distributions differ significantly, green and gold(en) being significantly more common in Thomas and blue and grey less common than in the large corpus. We also test a hypothesis that the density of colour words increases from earlier to later poems. The differences are found not to be statistically significant.

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Frequency Data

  • Christopher Butler,
  • Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen

摘要

We first look at the frequency and usage of the words colour(s)/(ed) in Thomas’s poems. This analysis leads to the hypothesis that the poet uses colour as an essential element in the natural and emotional world. The chapter then presents a table showing the complete frequency data for each colour word, for every poem containing at least one. The frequency ordering is green > black > white > gold(en) > red > blue > yellow, brown > grey, silver > scarlet, emerald > ochre, crimson, stammel. The total number of colour occurrences is 223. The total number of lines of poetry is 3004, so the mean number of colour words per 100 lines is 3004/223 = 7.42. Of the 93 poems, 59 (63.4%) contain at least one instance of a colour word. A further table breaks the occurrences down into the colour term categories presented in Chap. 3 and draws conclusions relating to the relative frequencies of the classes of colour terms. We then go on to compare Thomas’s colour word usage with that described in Steinvall’s (English Colour Terms in Context. Modern Language Institute, Umeå University, 2002) study of colour vocabulary in the Bank of English corpus. Statistical analysis shows that the two distributions differ significantly, green and gold(en) being significantly more common in Thomas and blue and grey less common than in the large corpus. We also test a hypothesis that the density of colour words increases from earlier to later poems. The differences are found not to be statistically significant.