Tag: (E) yukuri-yukuri

(2018) English, Warlpiri – Colours and vision


Wierzbicka, Anna (2018). How much longer can the Berlin and Kay paradigm dominate visual semantics? English, Russian and Warlpiri seen ‘from the native’s point of view’. In Diana Young (Ed.), Rematerializing colour: From concept to substance (pp. 67-90). Herefordshire: Sean Kingston Publishing.

Abstract:

How does the outsider linguist find out if speakers of another language have colour terms? Using the Australian Aboriginal language Warlpiri as a starting point, the author argues that interpretation of the patterns of names produced in response to stimuli (such as Munsell colour chips) is difficult, and one has to take care not to assign English terms to those patterns. That is, in trying to interpret what a word means, we cannot assume that kardirri means ‘white’, because speakers produced this word when looking at chips with colours that English speakers might call ‘white’. The focus here is on determining the senses (intensions) of words – that is, on finding language-specific categories. The Warlpiri lack a word approximating the English word ‘colour’. It is claimed that, if speakers do not have a word for a category such as colour, it is hard to say that in their minds they see the world in terms of a cognitive category ‘colour’ (which is not to deny that they have colour vision).

Examination of dictionary entries in the Warlpiri-English Dictionary establishes the importance of the properties ‘visual conspicuousness’ (the startling pink prunus trees), ‘things shining somewhere’ (sunlight gleaming on the white cockatoos), ‘visual contrasts within an object’ (the dappled pink and green of the japonica hedge), and creating colour reference by comparison with things in the world around (kunjuru ‘smoke’, kunjuru-kunjuru ‘like smoke’, a term conventionally applied to smoke-coloured things). However, even though the Dictionary is a good starting-place for raising such hypotheses, it cannot help us test them, since it is a collection of all words, with little comment on whether they are used frequently or not, and since the words come from several dialects.

The author argues against using the word ‘colour’ in the English definitions and translations in the dictionary, because this creates or reinforces a belief that the Warlpiri have a linguistic category of ‘colour’.

Rating:


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

(2005) Visual semantics


Wierzbicka, Anna (2005). There are no “color universals” but there are universals of visual semantics. Anthropological Linguistics, 47(2), 217-244. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25132327

The search for the “universals of colour” that was initiated by Berlin and Kay’s classic book is based on the assumption that there can be, and indeed that there are, some conceptual universals of colour. This article brings new evidence, new analyses, and new arguments against the Berlin and Kay paradigm, and offers a radically different alternative to it. The new data on which the argument is based come, in particular, from Australian languages, as well as from Polish and Russian. The article deconstructs the concept of “colour,” and shows how indigenous visual descriptors can be analysed without reference to colour, on the basis of identifiable visual prototypes and the universal concept of seeing. It also offers a model for analysing semantic change and variation from “the native’s point of view”.

(2008) English, Warlpiri – Visual semantics


Wierzbicka, Anna (2008). Why there are no ‘colour universals’ in language and thought. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, (N.S.) 14, 407-425. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9655.2008.00509.x

A more recent publication building on this one is chapter 4 (pp. 80-101) of:

Goddard, Cliff, & Wierzbicka, Anna (2014). Words and meanings: Lexical semantics across domains, languages, and cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Do all people live in a world full of colours? Perceptually, yes (unless they are visually impaired), but conceptually, no: there are many languages which have no word for ‘colour’ and in which the question What colour is it? cannot be asked and presumably does not arise. Yet the powerful and still immensely influential theory of Berlin and Kay assumes otherwise. While building on the author’s earlier work on colour semantics, this article brings new evidence against the Berlin and Kay paradigm, and presents a fundamentally different approach. The new data on which the argument is based come from Australian languages. In particular, the article presents a detailed study of the visual world reflected in the Australian language Warlpiri and in Warlpiri ways of speaking, showing that while Warlpiri people have no “colour talk” (and no “colour practices”), they have a rich visual discourse of other kinds, linked with their own cultural practices. It also offers a methodology for identifying indigenous meanings without the grid of the English concept ‘colour’, and for revealing “the native’s point of view”.


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners