poisongalore

Color naming across languages
Kay, Paul, Brent Berlin, Luisa Maffi, and William Merrifield
in C.L Hardin and L. Maffi (eds.)
Color Categories in Thought and Language, Cambridge. 1997
dalla pagina icsi di Paul Kay:
“1 . Introduction: Prior cross-linguistic research on color naming This chapter summarizes some of the research on cross-linguistic color categorization and naming that has addressed issues raised in Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (Berlin and Kay 1969, hereafter B&K). It then advances some speculations regarding future developments—especially regarding the analysis, now in progress, of the data of the World Color Survey (hereafter WCS). In the latter respect the chapter serves as something of a progress report on the current state of analysis of the WCS data, as well as a promissory note on the full analysis to come. B&K proposed two general hypotheses about basic color terms and the categories they name:
(1) there is a restricted universal inventory of such categories;
(2) a language adds basic color terms in a constrained order, interpreted as an evolutionary sequence.

These two hypotheses have been substantially confirmed by subsequent research. […]
The WCS was begun in 1976. It was designed for two major purposes. The first was to assess the general hypotheses advanced by B&K against a broader empirical basis.
Methodological objections had been raised to the empirical generalizations of B&K.
The most important of these were that:
(1) the twenty languages studied experimentally were not prima facie sufficiently numerous to justify universal conclusions;
(2) the data were obtained in Berkeley rather than in native communities;
(3) most of the speakers interviewed spoke English as well as their native language;
(4) the number of speakers interviewed for most of the languages was three or fewer; and
(5) the interviewers were not, for the most part, skilled speakers of the languages studied.
The second major purpose of the WCS was to deepen our knowledge regarding universals, variation and historical development in basic color term systems.
The methods and some initial results of the WCS are reported in Kay, Berlin and Merrifield (1991, hereafter KBM).
With the help of field linguists of the Summer Institute of Linguistics and using a stimulus array substantially the same as that of B&K, comparable data on naming ranges and focal choices for basic color terms were collected on 110 languages in situ. In most cases twenty-five speakers were interviewed per language. Monolingual speakers were sought insofar as possible. A methodological departure of the WCS from the method of B&K was that chip-naming judgments were obtained on individual chip presentations, rather than the full array of stimuli.
[…]
3 . Recent conceptual developments
Analysis of the WCS data is currently being conducted within the following conceptual framework, based on our provisional examination of the data (and therefore subject to revision as the analysis proceeds).
A. Ever since B&K (41-45) discussed the ‘premature’ appearance of grey, evidence has accumulated suggesting that the temporal development of basic color term systems should be seen, not as a single process, but as two partially independent processes:
(1) the division of composite categories into the six fundamentals and
(2) the combination of fundamental categories into derived categories. […]
Consequently, the developmental status of a system is now expressed in terms of a ‘basic stage’, which characterizes the system with respect to its composite and fundamental categories, plus a list (often very short) of the derived and heterogeneous18 categories which correspond to basic color terms in this system. […]
B. The categories spanning yellow and green remain a problem, as discussed in KBM. They are few in number, but they unquestionably exist and cannot be dismissed as ethnographic or experimental error. A special study of systems containing categories of this kind is planned. For the moment, systems with a category spanning yellow and green are set aside. […]
C. Composite category reduction is itself profitably viewed as consisting of two partially independent processes: dissolution of the white/warm channel (w) and dissolution […] of the black/cool channel (c). From this perspective, composite category reduction is the same thing as basic stage evolution, that is, the progressive division of the two original composite categories into their six constituent fundamentals, representing the sequence of basic stages I through V. Progress from Stage I (two composite categories comprising three fundamentals each) to Stage V (six fundamental categories) requires two divisions in each of the w and c channels.
D. Although w-division and c-division are partially independent processes, they interact. In our model, the first of the four divisions is always in the w channel, with the result that Stage II systems retain the 3-fundamental c-composite category (Bk/G/Bu). Also, the fourth and final division is always in the c channel, entailing that Stage IV systems always retain a c-composite (and, of course, no w-composite). […]
E. In addition to such constraints on the interaction between the w and c channels, our model also sets constraints on the process of division within each channel. The w channel is more tightly constrained than the c channel. […]”.