Modality and meaning

Colour naming in Icelandic Sign Language

Abstract

Brent Berlin and Paul Kay brought a sea change in semantic studies of colour terms when they published their book Basic Color Terms in 1969. Up to that point the dominant view was that each language represented a unique conceptual organisation of the world, a view supported by the fact that the colour spectrum is a continuum which provides not obvious breaks for the purposes of naming. Despite the many criticisms of their work which have followed, their methodology has proven extremely infl uential and been widely adopted. The project Evolution of Semantic Systems, 2011–2012, adopted their methodology for a study of colour terms in the Indo-European languages and the Colours in Context project applied the same methods to a study of Icelandic Sign Language. Signed languages diff er in many ways from spoken languages but the results of this study suggest the broad organisation of the colour space is the same in Icelandic Sign Language, Icelandic and British English. The colour space is organised by a few dominant terms, largely the same as Berlin and Kay ́s original basic colour terms. Yet within that broad patt ern is considerable microvariation, especially in the spaces between the dominant terms. There the characteristic patt erns of word formation in the language have a clear influence in colour naming strategies.