Color Language and Color Categorization

This volume represents a unique collection of chapters on the way in which color is categorized and named in a number of languages. Although color research has been a topic of focus for researchers for decades, the contributions here show that many aspects of color language and categorization are as yet unexplored, and that current theories and methodologies which investigate color language are still evolving. Some core questions addressed here include: How is color conceptualized through language? What kind of linguistic tools do languages use to describe color? Which factors tend to bias color language? What methodologies could be used to understand human color categorization and language better? How do color vocabularies evolve? How does context impact the color cognition?

The chapters collected here adopt different theoretical and methodological approaches in describing new empirical research on how the concept of color is represented in a variety of different languages. Researchers in linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science present a set of new explorations and challenges in the area of color language. The book promotes several methodological and disciplinary dimensions to color studies. The color category is given an in-depth and broad-based examination, so a reader interested in color conceptualization for itself will be able to form a solid vision of the subject.

Geda Paulsen is a Senior Lexicographer at the Institute of the Estonian Language in Tallinn. She received her PhD from the Åbo Akademi University, Finland, in 2011 with a thesis about causative derivative verbs in Finnish. Her research interests include lexical conceptual semantics, morphosyntax, word formation, pragmatics, contrastive linguistics, and language learning and acquisition. During her assignment as a researcher at the Institute of the Estonian Language in Tallinn and her participation in the Color Group activities at the Institute, she explored the lexical conceptual structure of color vocabulary with a special interest in semantics and the syntax of color events.

Mari Uusküla is Associate Professor of Translation Studies at Tallinn University, having received her PhD in Linguistics (Uralic Languages) from the University of Tartu, Estonia, in 2008. During her doctoral studies, she also visited the University of Budapest, Hungary, and the University of Florence, Italy. Her research interests include linguistics, lexical semantics, semantic typology, color naming, categorization and perception, field linguistics, and psycholinguistics. She was previously the leader of the Color Group at the Institute of the Estonian Language, and has studied color in the languages of the Baltic Sea, Central Europe and the Mediterranean. In addition, she has published research articles on color semantics and categorization in a range of European languages including Hungarian, Italian, Russian, Finnish, and Czech.

Jonathan Brindle holds a position as Research Affiliate in the Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics research group at the University of Leuven. His research focuses on corpus-linguistic studies of original narrative texts, lexical dialectal variation in language contact area, lexicography in Gur linguistics, data collection methods, and quantitative analysis of indigenous linguistic practices.

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