Using Statistics for Cross-linguistic Semantics: A Quantitative Investigation of the Typology of Colour Naming Systems  

Oleh:

Jager, Gerhard

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Journal of Semantics (Sebagian Full Text) vol. 29 no. 4 (2012), page 521–544.
Fulltext: Jger_Gerhard.pdf (1.21MB)

Isi artikel

The paper presents a statistical evaluation of the typological data about colour naming systems across the languages of the world that have been obtained by the World Color Survey. In a first step, we discuss a principal component analysis of the categorization data. This leads to a small set of easily interpretable features that are dominant in colour categorization. These features were used for a dimensionality reduction of the categorization data. Based on the thus preprocessed data, it is investigated how the participants of the World Color Survey partition the six primary colours black, white, red, green, yellow and blue into semantic categories. We find a substantial number of counter-examples to the implicative semantic universals that have been suggested in the literature. Finally, an alternative system of semantic universals pertaining to colour naming systems is proposed that provides a better fit of the data.

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