Explores the psychophysical and neurophysical determinants of cross-linguistic constraints on the shape of color lexicons.

Moving on from the meanings of single colours, Theo van Leeuwen develops the theory that many different features shape the way we attach meaning to the colours we see in front of us, and the idea that colour schemes are more important than individual colours. The Language of Colour is the ideal textbook for students of Multimodality and Language and Communication within Applied Linguistics, communication studies, art and design and cultural studies.

This volume presents authoritative and up-to-date research in colour studies by specialists across a wide range of academic disciplines, including vision science, psychology, psycholinguistics, linguistics, anthropology, onomastics, philosophy, archaeology and design. The chapters have been developed from papers and posters presented at the Progress in Colour Studies (PICS2016) conference held at University College London in September 2016. The book continues the series from the earlier PICS conferences, which have become renowned for their insights into colour in language and cognition. In the present book all chapters have been rigorously peer-reviewed and revised to ensure the highest standards throughout. The chapters are grouped into three sections: Colour Perception and Cognition; The Language of Colour; and The Diversity of Colour. Each section is preceded by a short introduction drawing together the themes of its chapters. There are over 120 colour illustrations.

A masterpiece of linguistics scholarship, at once erudite and entertaining, confronts the thorny question of how—and whether—culture shapes language and language, culture Linguistics has long shied away from claiming any link between a language and the culture of its speakers: too much simplistic (even bigoted) chatter about the romance of Italian and the goose-stepping orderliness of German has made serious thinkers wary of the entire subject. But now, acclaimed linguist Guy Deutscher has dared to reopen the issue. Can culture influence language—and vice versa? Can different languages lead their speakers to different thoughts? Could our experience of the world depend on whether our language has a word for "blue"? Challenging the consensus that the fundaments of language are hard-wired in our genes and thus universal, Deutscher argues that the answer to all these questions is—yes. In thrilling fashion, he takes us from Homer to Darwin, from Yale to the Amazon, from how to name the rainbow to why Russian water—a "she"—becomes a "he" once you dip a tea bag into her, demonstrating that language does in fact reflect culture in ways that are anything but trivial. Audacious, delightful, and field-changing, Through the Language Glass is a classic of intellectual discovery.

This book presents a major leap forward in the understanding of colour by showing how richer descriptions of colour samples can be operationalized in agent-based models. Four different language strategies are explored: the basic colour strategy, the graded membership strategy, the category combination strategy and the basic modification strategy. These strategies are firmly rooted in empirical observations in natural languages, with a focus on compositionality at both the syntactic and semantic level. Through a series of in-depth experiments, this book discerns the impact of the environment, language and embodiment on the formation of basic colour systems. Finally, the experiments demonstrate how language users can invent their own language strategies of increasing complexity by combining primitive cognitive operators, and how these strategies can be aligned between language users through linguistic interactions.

In this beautiful and thorough investigation, The Secret Language of Color celebrates and illuminates the countless ways in which color colors our world. Why is the sky blue, the grass green, a rose red? Most of us have no idea how to answer these questions, nor are we aware that color pervades nearly all aspects of life, from the subatomic realm and the natural world to human culture and psychology. Organized into chapters that begin with a fascinating explanation of the physics and chemistry of color, The Secret Language of Color travels from outer space to Earth, from plants to animals to humans. In these chapters we learn about how and why we see color, the nature of rainbows, animals with color vision far superior and far inferior to our own, how our language influences the colors we see, and much more. Between these chapters, authors Joann Eckstut and Ariele Eckstut turn their attention to the individual hues of the visible spectrum?red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet?presenting each in fascinating, in-depth detail. Including hundreds of stunning photographs and dozens of informative, often entertaining graphics, every page is a breathtaking demonstration of color and its role in the world around us. Whether you see red, are a shrinking violet, or talk a blue streak, this is the perfect book for anyone interested in the history, science, culture, and beatuty of color in the natural and man-made world.

Generalisations about language and culture are at best amusing and meaningless, but is there anything sensible left to be said about the relation between language, culture and thought? *Does language reflect the culture of a society? *I

This volume presents some of the latest research in colour studies by specialists across a wide range of academic disciplines. Many are represented here, including anthropology, archaeology, the fine arts, linguistics, onomastics, philosophy, psychology and vision science. The chapters have been developed from papers and posters presented at the Progress in Colour Studies (PICS12) conference held at the University of Glasgow. Papers from the earlier PICS04 and PICS08 conferences were published by John Benjamins as Progress in Colour Studies, 2 volumes, 2006 and New Directions in Colour Studies, 2011, respectively. The opening chapter of this new volume stems from the conference keynote talk on prehistoric colour semantics by Carole P. Biggam. The remaining chapters are grouped into three sections: colour and linguistics; colour categorization, naming and preference; and colour and the world. Each section is preceded by a short preface drawing together the themes of the chapters within it. There are thirty-one colour illustrations.

The field of color categorization has always been intrinsically multi- and inter-disciplinary, since its beginnings in the nineteenth century. The main contribution of this book is to foster a new level of integration among different approaches to the anthropological study of color. The editors have put great effort into bringing together research from anthropology, linguistics, psychology, semiotics, and a variety of other fields, by promoting the exploration of the different but interacting and complementary ways in which these various perspectives model the domain of color experience. By so doing, they significantly promote the emergence of a coherent field of the anthropology of color. As of February 2018, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.