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Taylor 1

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.

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Taylor 1

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  1. Taylor 1 The Categorization of Color

  2. 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)

  3. 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?

  4. 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.

  5. 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)

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. 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

  9. 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

  10. 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)

  11. 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.

  12. 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.”

  13. 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.”

  14. 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

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