Lexical Innovation in Business Colour Idioms: Evidence from Large Language Models in Five Languages

Abstract

Lexical innovation refers to the process of creating new lexical items, enabling languages to adapt to evolving sociocultural and material realities. The domains of business, economics, and finance are among the most productive ones of lexical innovation. The present research study lies at the intersection of lexical innovation, idiomaticity, and large language model (henceforth, LLM) research and investigates lexical productivity, semantic shift, and globalisation (Anglocentric changes) in business-related colour idioms by comparing human translation and annotation with the output of LLMs. The current experiment involves an initial study carried out for five languages: English (the pivotal one), Albanian (AL), Hebrew (HE), Hungarian (HU), Lithuanian (LT), and Standard European Portuguese (PT). The research results reveal that LLMs show high mutual agreement, but the agreement with humans is lower. The internal consistency of LLMs reflects shared Anglocentric metaphor encoding rather than convergence toward human idiomatic usage. It demonstrates that human expertise remains essential for highquality idiomatic translation, particularly for culture-specific expressions.