different color of brackets

Question

I need an advice.. I need to recreate the following formula:

The only difference is that color of the brackets needs to be red. Is it neccessary to do this in math mode, or can be achieved in some other way ?

Answer 1

Is it neccessary to do this in math mode?

It would certainly simplify doing some things, such as the sizing of the large square brackets.

The following solution is based on the macro \colvec, which is defined in the preamble. It assumes that it's encountered in math mode. It uses \color directives to switch between red and black and it uses an array environment to "stack" the contents. Note that the \colvec macro is designed to be nestable; hence, it can be used both for the outer structure and the three inner structures. The text material inside each \colvec is handled using \textsc (for smallcaps) and \textbf (for boldface) directives.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{array,amsmath,xcolor}
\newcommand{\colvec}[1]{ % % to be used in math mode
  \color{red}\left[\color{black}
    \begin{array}{@{}l@{}} #1 \end{array}
  \color{red}\right]\color{black}
}

\begin{document}
\begin{center}
$ % start math mode
\colvec{%
  \alpha \\
  \textsc{argstr} =
    \colvec{
      \textsc{arg}1 = x\\
      \dots}\\[2ex] % a bit of extra vertical space
  \textsc{eventstr} = 
    \colvec{%
      \textsc{e}1 = e_1 \\
      \dots}\\[2ex] % ditto
  \textsc{qualia} = 
    \colvec{%
      \textsc{const} = \textbf{what $x$ is made of}\\
      \textsc{formal} = \textbf{what $x$ is}\\
      \textsc{telic} = \textbf{function of $x$}\\
      \textsc{agentive} = \textbf{how $x$ came into being}}
  }
$ % end math mode
\end{center}
\end{document}