Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 102, Issue 23, Pages 8386-8391Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0503281102
Keywords
whorf; linguistic relativity; Berinmo; best example; categories
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It is widely held that named color categories in the world's languages are organized around universal focal colors and that these focal colors tend to be chosen as the best examples of color terms across languages. However, this notion has been supported primarily by data from languages of industrialized societies. In contrast, recent research on a language from a nonindustrialized society has called this idea into question. We examine color-naming data from languages of 110 nonindustrialized societies and show that (i) best-example choices for color terms in these languages cluster near the prototypes for English white, black, red, green, yellow, and blue, and (it) best-example choices cluster more tightly across languages than do the centers of category extensions, suggesting that universal best examples (foci) may be the source of universal tendencies in color naming.
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