Kilivila Color Terms

This paper documents the results of a study of color terms produced by Trobriand Islanders. Eleven color stimuli were presented to 60 informants in five different age-groups ranging from approximately 4 to 75 years. These informants, native speakers of Kilivila, live in Tauwema village on Kaileuna Island, one of the Trobriand Islands in Papua New Guinea.The paper first describes the method and the aims of the study. It then discusses the strategies of language production used by the informants, presents the inventory of the lexical set of color terms in Kilivila, and describes the semantic scope of these terms. Finally it discusses aspects of language change in progress that affect this lexical set of color terms in a rather dramatic way.

[1]  T. W. Adorno.  Jargon der Eigentlichkeit : zur deutschen Ideologie , 1964 .

[2]  H. Gipper,et al.  Gibt Es Ein Sprachliches Relativitätsprinzip? Untersuchungen Zur Sapir-Whorf-Hypothese , 1972 .

[3]  P. Kay,et al.  The linguistic significance of the meanings of basic color terms , 1978 .

[4]  Benjamin Cohen,et al.  Models of Concepts , 1984, Cogn. Sci..

[5]  Uriel Weinreich,et al.  Languages in Contact: French, German and Romansh in twentieth-century Switzerland , 2011 .

[6]  H. Zollinger,et al.  Color-Term Salience and Neurophysiology of Color Vision , 1979 .

[7]  M. Sanders.  Handbook of Sensory Physiology , 1975 .

[8]  H. H. Clark,et al.  Psychology and language : an introduction to psycholinguistics , 1979 .

[9]  P. Kay.  Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution , 1969 .

[10]  H. Conklin,et al.  Hanunóo Color Categories , 1955, Southwestern Journal of Anthropology.

[11]  W. Kempton,et al.  Tarahumara color modifiers: category structure presaging evolutionary change , 1983 .

[12]  Philip K. Bock.  Modern Cultural Anthropology: An Introduction , 1978 .

[13]  P. Kay,et al.  What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? , 1983 .

[14]  R. Dixon.  Where Have all the Adjectives Gone , 1977 .

[15]  A. von Wattenwyl,et al.  Color naming by art students and science students: A comparative study , 1981 .

[16]  B. Berger.  How Long Is a Generation , 1960 .

[17]  S. Ervin,et al.  Navaho color categories , 1960 .

[18]  D. Entwisle,et al.  Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular.@@@Sociolinguistic Patterns. , 1975 .

[19]  Ewald Hering,et al.  Grundzüge der Lehre vom Lichtsinn. , 1920 .

[20]  John Lyons,et al.  Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics , 1971 .

[21]  Richard K. Sun,et al.  Perceptual Distances and the Basic Color Term Encoding Sequence , 1983 .