Names of colors in the texts of online editions for women: origin, semantics, functions?

Background. Because of their anthropocentricity, color names belong to language universals and are the part of active lexicon. The purpose of this article is to characterize the actual qualities of the lexical-semantic group of color names, sources, and ways of their replenishment with the help of structural, descriptive, and comparative research methods on the material of online resources entertaining and informational texts for women. The language of the media seems to be a sign of progressiveness and intellectualism; hence, speakers eagerly follow it, satisfying their communicative and cognitive demands. The main results of this study are as follows: 1) the structure of a slick magazine for women involves an increasing reduction in size of the verbal component of the message; however, its information weight, on the contrary, increases; 2) the name of color is intended to perform not the primary ？ reference ？function, but becomes a means of manipulation, forming a demand for the desirable reality of the audience. The critical manifestation of this tendency is the appearance of color names correlated with non-ens; 3) analysis of the frequency of color names usage shows that tokens on the designation of “pure” colors belong to the rarely used ones. The quantitative composition of the microsystem of the main colors and means for indicating the intensity of the expression of color is completely correlated with public tastes and preferences: the more important and widespread the realia is, the greater the number of tokens are used on its designation; 4) we can state the significant replenishment of the corpus of the names of colors due to: a) development of the new meanings of polysemic words (there is a figurative component of the meaning resulting from the metaphorical transfer that forms the content of the new concept) and b) lexical borrowings from other languages, most often by transliterating or modeling words and constructions after foreign patterns. Therefore, the composition of the origin of the analyzed lexical-semantic group is rather diverse: there are both long-established nominations (though they are in minority) and lexemes-neologisms, the appearance of which is not caused by internal-language factors but subordinated to the commercial nature of these media. Discussion. The studying of a short-period dynamics of the only one lexical-semantic group suggests wider conclusions and generalizations, which go far beyond the borders of lexicology. In particular, today the Ukrainian-language segment of Internet resources for women is largely unoriginal in nature, duplicating Russian or English editions...