Formal theory-driven, psycholinguistic data and corpus-driven study confirms the absence of a basic colour term for ORANGE in Modern Standard Mandarin and elaborates the syntaxico-semantic ‘distributional potential’ criterion for basicness

This paper deploys formal, experimental, and corpus-based evidence to demonstrate that, despite being psychologically salient in Modern Standard Mandarin, ORANGE is not yet encoded by a monomorphemic monosyllabic single-character colour term, and the possible candidates do not possess the entire set of the criteria to become ‘basic’. It also suggests an additional analysis of the syntaxico-semantic ‘distributional potential’ criterion, which is a precondition for colour terms’ basicness.