The validity of the linguistic relativity principle continues to stimulate vigorous debate and research. The debate has recently shifted from the behavioural investigation arena to a more biologically grounded field, in which tangible physiological evidence for language effects on perception can be obtained. Using brain potentials in a colour…

Robert Perrin emphasizes the active and playful power that can be discovered from specificity of language. Students observe the impact carefully chosen words have in their daily lives by examining names of products and colors used for particular contexts and audiences, as well as names given to inventions, highlighting the vibrancy of…

Examines the basic color vocabulary of modern standard French in the light of recent research on color vocabularies. In attempting to justify the two basic terms for brown, this study gives some account of the collocational factors which determine the selection of one or the other in particular contexts. (AMH)

Examines the color systems of various Miwok languages and attempts a reconstruction of the Proto-Miwok color system. (AM)

Ethnoscience studies, and studies of color vocabulary in particular, have firmly established that to understand the full range of meaning of a word in any language, each new language must be approached on its own terms, without a priori theories of semantic universals. It has been shown that color words in fact encode a great deal of…

Recent empirical research into the meaning of words for color provides evidence that contradicts two widely held beliefs in linguistics and the philosophy of language. This paper presents a summary of this evidence, uses it as a basis to construct a general model of basic color-term semantics, and explores the implications of this model for…

Presents a review of the literature dealing with the theory of the naming of colors. A comparison is made between the names of colors in Italian and Dutch, discussing the differences between languages in terms of the influence of the sociocultural context. (61 references) (CFM)

Criticism has been directed at a growing body of literature broadly referred to as ethnoscience, ethnosemantics, folk science, ethnographic semantics, and cognitive anthropology. Criticisms concern methodological and analytic aspects of ethnoscientific procedure, and the directions of ethnosemantic research from a theoretical point of view. The…