Taylor 1 The Categorization of Color

Why Cateogries? “The things that linguists study – words, morphemes, syntactic structures, etc. – not only constitute categories in themselves, they also stand for categories.” (p. 1)

Important Questions Do categories have any basis in the real world or are they constructs of the mind? What is their internal structure? How are categories learned? How do people assign entities to a category? What relationships exist among categories?

1.1 Why color terms? Some believe that reality is a continuum, that categories have no basis in reality, are constructs imposed upon it. For color, reality is a continuum (see 3D color continuum), with no discrete categories. Yet people do have color categories, and there are language-specific differences.

Arbitrariness Sassure/structuralists assume that linguistic signs are arbitrary in 2 ways: –1. the association of a particular form with a particular meaning is arbitrary (this is largely uncontroversial, but cf. onomatopoeia and sound symbolism) –2. the meaning associated with a linguistic form is also arbitrary (this is controversial, and we will challenge it)

A digression on arbitrariness… There is an assumption (probably inspired by the sciences) that there are only two kinds of phenomena: –Predictable vs. Arbitrary I think that this assumption is a fallacy. There is a third possibility. A phenomenon may be neither predictable nor arbitrary, but may instead be Motivated.

Sassurian/Structuralist Principles: Language is a self-contained, autonomous system. Concepts are purely differential. All terms in a system have equal status. All referents of a term (members of a category) have equal status. The object of study is the system, not any individual terms.

1.3 An Alternative Approach: Focal Colors “Basic Color Terms” (Berlin & Kay 1969), on the basis of evidence from 98 languages, make 2 claims: –1. There is a universal total inventory of exactly eleven basic color categories –2. There is an implicational hierarchy for color terms: black/white < red < yellow/green < blue < brown < grey/orange/purple/pink

Why were Berlin&Kay’s results such a big deal? It violates many of the structuralist assumptions: –Basic level is not the lowest, most primitive level (see Chapter 3) –Participants were able to select “best examples” – all members do not have equal status –The implicational hierarchy shows that all terms do not have equal status –Color terminology is not altogether arbitrary

More on Berlin&Kay’s results: There are focal colors that people agree on cross-linguistically, that are more readily learned (even by the Dani, who have only two color terms) Rods and cones add some landmarks to the smooth continuum of color: there are perceptual peaks (corresponding to focal colors) and valleys (corresponding to in- between colors)

Focal color categories prove structuralism inadequate: Color categories have center-periphery structure. A color term has an inherent value, is not just different from other terms.

1.4 Autonomous Linguistics vs. Cognitive Linguistics Autonomous linguistic theories –Structuralism: “The world out there and how people interact with it, how they perceive and conceptualize it, are, in the structuralist view, extra-linguistic factors which do not impinge on the language itself.”

1.4 Autonomous Linguistics vs. Cognitive Linguistics, cont’d. Autonomous linguistic theories –Generative-transformational paradigm: The language faculty is autonomous within the brain. “The meanings of terms in a language are not, in effect, facts of language at all. Language, as a computational system for generating sentences, has nothing to do with how a person conceptualizes his world, how he perceives it, how he interacts with it.”

1.4 Autonomous Linguistics vs. Cognitive Linguistics, cont’d. Cognitive linguistics –No distinction needs to be drawn between linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge –For example, color terms are facts about both human cognition and human language –Lakoff’s “null hypothesis”: there are no purely linguistic abilities at all – this hypothesis permits a coherent account of a wide range of linguistic phenomena