[Sigcr-l] Culture/language affecting KO

[Simon Spero]

2009/9/22 Birger Hjørland <BH at db.dk>

>
> A fascinating topic related to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is color
> perception and color classification in different cultures. A cognitive
> theory about universal color categories formulated by Berlin & Kay has been
> dominating, but also seriously criticized. I believe the cultural-relative
> point of view is a strong one and very important to information science in
> general and to Knowledge Organization in particular.
>



The original theory of Berlin and Kay (1969) has stood up reasonably well
over time, though the nature of objections have changed. As Paul Kay notes
in his entry  "Color Categorization"  in the MIT Encyclopedia of the
Cognitive Sciences (Wilson & Keil 1999)

Since 1978, two important surveys of color lexicons have been conducted,
both supporting the two broad Berlin and Kay hypotheses of semantic
universals and evolutionary sequence in the lexical encoding of colors: the
World Color Survey (Kay et al. 1997) and the Mesoamerican Color Survey
(MacLaury 1997). Relativist objection to the Berlin and Kay paradigm of
research on color categorization has continued, emphasis shifting away from
criticism of the rigor with which the Berlin and Kay procedures of mapping
words to colors were applied toward challenging the legitimacy of any such
procedures (e.g., Lucy 1997; Saunders and van Brake 1997)

I found Rúa (2003)  to be interesting, but I've gotten a bit disenchanted
with "capital C" Cognitive Linguistics.   HPSG/SBCG and related
contraint-based approaches seem  much more promising at the moment (this
testable hypotheses thing could catch on :-).



Simon
---
Berlin, Brent and Paul Kay (1969). Basic color terms–Their universality and
evolution. University of Caifornia Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles.
Wilson, R. A and F. C Keil (1999). The MIT encyclopedia of the cognitive
sciences. MIT Press.
Rúa, Paula López (2003). Birds, Colours and Prepositions: The Theory of
Categorization and Its Applications in Linguistics. Müunchen: Lincom.

-- [cited in quotation, unread; ses]
Kay, P., B. Berlin, L. Maffi, and W. Merrifield. (1997). Color naming across
languages. In C. L. Hardin and L. Maffi, Eds., Color Categories in Thought
and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lucy, J. A. (1997). The linguistics of color. In C. L. Hardin and L. Maffi,
Eds., Color Categories in Thought and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
MacLaury, R. E. (1987). Coextensive semantic ranges: different names for
distinct vantages of one category. Papers from the 23rd Annual Meeting of
the Chicago Linguistic Society, Part I, 268–282.

Saunders, B. A. C., and J. van Brakel. (1997). Are there non-trivial
constraints on colour categorization? Brain and Behavioral Sciences.

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