Presentations

Shades of salience: Multivariate analysis of prototypicality effects in color terms Research question The proposed study aims to develop a rigorous quantitative method to measure the prototypicality effects in the semantics of lexical units, using color terminology in American advertising as the source of data. We approach this goal from two perspectives. Firstly, we analyze the psycholinguistic techniques developed in basic color categorization studies for measuring salience (basicness) of color terms and compare them to corpus-based measurements of color term salience. Secondly, we analyze a number of color terms using a bottom-up quantitative procedure for measuring their relative salience based on formal linguistic properties. Following the usage-based approach to semantics, we specifically avoid the a priori distinction between more prototypical (basic) and less prototypical (non-basic) color terms. Using the convergent evidence from psycholinguistic and corpus-based measurements, we suggest that a number of techniques developed in corpus-driven studies could be added to the arsenal of measurements applied in the basic color term (BCT) tradition. This would allow extending the analyses and generalizations to include a wider range of color terms and categories. Background Over the last half century, anthropological, psycholinguistic and linguistic studies of color categorization have developed a number of quantitative experimental procedures for measuring the psychological and linguistic salience (basicness) of color terms (see