Description

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The work reported in this monograph was begun in the winter of 1967 in a graduate seminar at Berkeley. Many of the basic data were gathered by members of the seminar and the theoretical framework presented here was initially developed in the context of the seminar discussions.

Much has been discovered since1969, the date of original publication, regarding the psychophysical and neurophysical determinants of universal, cross-linguistic constraints on the shape of basic color lexicons, and something, albeit less, can now also be said with some confidence regarding the constraining effects of these language-independent processes of color perception and conceptualization on the direction of evolution of basic color term lexicons.

About the Author

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Paul Kay is emeritus professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He joined the University in 1966 as a member of the Department of Anthropology, transferred to the Department of Linguistics in 1982, and then became a Senior Researcher in artificial intelligence at the International Computer Science Institute. He is best known for his work with Brent Berlin on color, first published in Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution.