INTRODUCTION
Colour is a subject that has captured assiduous attention from the earliest times. Its manifestation is discussed by Aristotle who advanced the first known theory of colour. The Greek philosopher determined four colours conforming to the four elements, namely earth, fire, water and wind. Colour terms also play an essential role in literature. In John Milton s epic poem Paradise Lost, colours are deeply rooted into a religious scenario and they serve as a means to express the poet s religious convictions.speaking, the investigation of colour categories is an interesting field of study among scholars. However, in Paradise Lost, colour terms have not been studied extensively. Thus, the object of the present investigation is colour categories in J. Milton s poem Paradise Lost. This investigation is vitally important both for linguistic and theological studies as the analysis casts a new light on the meaning of colour terms. The initial hypothesis could be formulated as follows: in Paradise Lost, colour categories serve as a vehicle to express J. Milton s religious ideas and believes. Hence, the paper aims at analyzing the semantic meaning of colours in J. Milton s poem Paradise Lost.
In order to achieve the aim, the following tasks are to be fulfilled:
§ to introduce the subject of semantics;
§ to present the basic principles of colour semantics;
§ to analyze the chosen colour terms in J. Milton s poem Paradise Lost.
This descriptive-analytical paper advocates an interdisciplinary approach embracing the fields of cognitive semantics, philosophy and theology.major part of theoretical insights is obtained from John Saeed s Semantics (2009), Vyvyan Evan s How Words Mean: Lexical Concepts, Cognitive Models, and Meaning (2009), Juan Eduardo Cirlot s Dictionary of Symbols (2001), Friedrich Ungerer and Hans- J? rg Schmid s An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics (1996) and Ray Jackendoff s Semantics and Cognition (1983) .paper consists of an Introduction, two Chapters, Conclusions, the Summary in Lithuanian, a List of References and Appendices. Chapter one, General Principles of Semantic Analysis, deals with the subject of semantics. Different views of linguists such as Anna Wiezbicka s, Ray Jackendoff and Vyvyan Evans are presented here. Chapter two, The Analysis of Colour Terms in Paradise Lost, focuses on the study of colour terms in the poem. Finally, Conclusions summarize the results and observations of the analysis of colour meanings in J. Milton s poem Paradise Lost.
1. GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF SEMANTIC ANALYSIS
is defined as the study of meaning in human language. To be more precise, it is the representation of the meaning of every type of component and expression in language as well as the meaning relationships between them. Moreover, semantics relates to symbolism as it studies the interpretation of symbols in their various combinations (Brown +2009, p. Xi).
1.1 The Subject of Semantics
traditional descriptive objectives of semantics are to represent the meaning of all words in a language and to reveal how the meanings of words in a language are connected (Saeed +2009, p. 53). Dirk Geeraerts points out that the meaning side of language and meaning itself is not something that exists in isolation, but it is integrated with commonsense human experience and world knowledge (Geeraerts +2006, p. 270). The Russian psycholinguist Rebecca Frumkina claims that the study of denotative meanings is the secondary discipline. She also focuses on the analysis of the meaning of the whole expression, keeping within the limits of Meaning? Text (Фрумкіна 1984, p. 7). Anna Wierzbicka states that meaning depends on constant aspects which can be ascertained in different ways such as a methodical introspective study, psycholinguistic experiments, common phraseological units, metaphors, etc. All these methods reveal that, in the speaker s minds, words are mutually related in different ways, and they allow us to establish how they are related (Wierzbicka +1996, p. 297) .are various types of semantics differentiated amongst scholars. This paper particularly deals with cognitive semantics where meanings are approached as concepts, namely as things in the mind (Cruse +2006, p. 3). This area of ??study is based on the analysis of the interrelations between experience, the conceptual system, and the semantic structure encoded by language. Indeed, language is a tool to represent semantics, the human conceptual systems as well as to construct the mea...
