“Blue-black caves of shade”. The Language of Colour in Juliet’s Trilogy by Munro

Using a socio-semiotic multimodal stylistic approach, this article inspects the language of colour in “Chance”, “Soon”, “Silence”, three interrelated stories by Alice Munro. Far from expressing abstract, universal and idealised concepts to be inscribed within a generative system of hues, it claims that colour language is metafunctionally conceptualised and socio-semiotically configured. First, it draws a map of verbal chromatic expressions by considering chromisms, compounds, adjectival and verbal patterns. Second, and in line with van Leeuwen’s (2011) “semiotics of colour”, it retrieves colour expressions according to a graded system (including the parameters of colour value, saturation, differentiation, modulation, mixing, purity, transition, hue), and, as such, as carrying symbolic and emotive implicatures. Third, it argues the metafunctional potential of the language of colour in ideational, interpersonal and textual terms for descriptive, emotional and cohesive concerns respectively. Ultimately, it claims that the language of colour, consciously, meticulously and systemically adopted, is functional in expressing Munro’s indeterminacy and elusiveness. Generally modulated, mixed and fluid, colours are, indeed, captured and rendered in their shaded, dynamic and transitory manifestations.