Color Categories in Thought and Language

In this volume the work of Berlin and Kay, which proposed that there are commonalities of basic colour term use that extend across languages and cultures, is reassessed in the light of current knowledge by a distinguished team of contributors from visual science, psychology, linguistics and anthropology.

In the late 1960s, Berlin and Kay argued that there are commonalities of basic colour term use that extend across languages and cultures, and probably express universal features of perception and cognition. In 1992, at the Asilomar Conference Centre, visual scientists and psychologists met with linguists and anthropologists for the first time to examine how these claims have fared in the light of current knowledge. To what extent can cross-cultural regularities be explained by the operation of the human visual system? What can the study of colour categorisation tell us about concept formation? Are the Berlin-Kay results an artifact of their methods? What tools have been and should be used to probe the structure of human colour categories? In this volume, which arose from that conference but also incorporates new work, a distinguished team of contributors survey key ideas, results and techniques from the study of human colour vision, as well as field methods and theoretical interpretations drawn from linguistic anthropology.