Theories and Models of Language Change Relativists VS Universalists - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Roland Mühlenbernd Prototype Semantics Review: Evolut. Approaches to Language Change Relativists VS Universalists Background: Human Color Perception The World Color Survey The Principles Model Homeworks

Theories and Models of Language Change

Session 9: Case Study I on Variation - Basic Color Terms Roland Mühlenbernd June 23, 2015

Roland Mühlenbernd Prototype Semantics Review: Evolut. Approaches to Language Change Relativists VS Universalists Background: Human Color Perception The World Color Survey The Principles Model Homeworks

Prototype Semantics

◮ Mervis & Rosch (1981): survey article of studies

establishing prototype semantics

◮ The theory of prototype semantics:

• 1. there is a quantitative gradiation of memberships of

entities to categories

• 2. whereby the prototype is the most central, normative

element of a category

Roland Mühlenbernd Prototype Semantics Review: Evolut. Approaches to Language Change Relativists VS Universalists Background: Human Color Perception The World Color Survey The Principles Model Homeworks

Prototype Semantics

The central questions:

◮ Arbitrariness: Are there any a priori reasons for dividing

• bjects into categories, or is the division initially arbitrary?

◮ Representativeness: Are all category members equally

representative of the category?

◮ Determinacy: Are categories specified by necessary and

sufficient conditions for membership? Are boundaries of categories well defined?

◮ Nature of Abstraction: How much abstraction is required

for learning and mentally representing concepts?

◮ Decomposability: Does a reasonable explanation of

• bjects consist in their decomposition into elementary

qualities?

◮ Nature of Attriibutes: What are the characteristics of the

attributes into which categories are decomposed?

Roland Mühlenbernd Prototype Semantics Review: Evolut. Approaches to Language Change Relativists VS Universalists Background: Human Color Perception The World Color Survey The Principles Model Homeworks

Prototype Semantics

Classical concept formation paradigm:

◮ “any one stimulus which fits the definition of a concept is

as good an example of it as any other”

◮ categories were seen as determinately established by

necessary and sufficient criteria for membership Establishing the concept of a prototype:

◮ nonequivalence of category members first proposed for

color (Berlin & Kay 1969)

◮ gradients of representativeness also found for many other

common semantic categories

◮ representativeness: defined operationally by means of

subjects’ ratings of how good an example an item is of its category

◮ prototype: an example of (locally) maximal

representativeness (the “clearest cases”)

Roland Mühlenbernd Prototype Semantics Review: Evolut. Approaches to Language Change Relativists VS Universalists Background: Human Color Perception The World Color Survey The Principles Model Homeworks

Review: Universal Darwinism

Mechanisms of universal evolution:

• 1. variation: continuing abundance of different elements
• 2. selection : number/probability of copies of elements -

depending on interaction between element features and environmental features

• 3. replication: reproduction/copying of elements

Roland Mühlenbernd Prototype Semantics Review: Evolut. Approaches to Language Change Relativists VS Universalists Background: Human Color Perception The World Color Survey The Principles Model Homeworks

Review: Variation & Universals

◮ inter-linguistic variation is limited → linguistic universals ◮ the explanation for the existence of universals can be

divided in two classes:

• 1. innate human cognitive capacities
• 2. functional constraints on the communication system

◮ i.o.w.: i) communicative constraints or ii) cognitive

capacities limit/shape the language system

◮ relativistic view: the language system limits/shapes

cognitive capacities

Roland Mühlenbernd Prototype Semantics Review: Evolut. Approaches to Language Change Relativists VS Universalists Background: Human Color Perception The World Color Survey The Principles Model Homeworks

Relativistic View

◮ first half of the 20th century: ascendance of linguistic and

cultural relativity (Sapir, Whorf)

◮ color lexicon a parade example for

◮ linguistic relativity (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis): structure of

language affects the way speakers conceptualize their world

◮ language determinism: language and its structures limit

and determine human knowledge or thought (strong linguistic relativity)

Roland Mühlenbernd Prototype Semantics Review: Evolut. Approaches to Language Change Relativists VS Universalists Background: Human Color Perception The World Color Survey The Principles Model Homeworks

View of Universalists

◮ claim: biology of all human beings is all same → the

development of color terminology has universal constraints

◮ famous study: Berlin & Kay (1969): “Basic Color Terms:

Their Universality and Evolution”

◮ in the late 1970’s the World Color Survey (WCS) was

initiated to test the hypothesis of Berlin & Kay (1969)

Roland Mühlenbernd Prototype Semantics Review: Evolut. Approaches to Language Change Relativists VS Universalists Background: Human Color Perception The World Color Survey The Principles Model Homeworks

Background: Human Color Perception

◮ Experiment show that humans identify every color with a

combination of three basic colors

◮ Computer graphics: usually red (645.16 nm), green

(526.32 nm) and blue (444.44 nm) The RGB-model (additive color space) The CMY-model (subtractive color space)

Roland Mühlenbernd Prototype Semantics Review: Evolut. Approaches to Language Change Relativists VS Universalists Background: Human Color Perception The World Color Survey The Principles Model Homeworks

Background: Human Color Perception

◮ RGB/CMY is not

introspective, distances in its space is not consistent with human perception

◮ psychological color

perception: hue, saturation and lightness

◮ → HSL color space

Roland Mühlenbernd Prototype Semantics Review: Evolut. Approaches to Language Change Relativists VS Universalists Background: Human Color Perception The World Color Survey The Principles Model Homeworks

Background: Human Color Perception

The Munsell Color Space

◮ Discrete color space where distance in space roughly

corresponds to perceptual distance

Roland Mühlenbernd Prototype Semantics Review: Evolut. Approaches to Language Change Relativists VS Universalists Background: Human Color Perception The World Color Survey The Principles Model Homeworks

Background: Human Color Perception

The Hering Color Space (1875)

◮ is based on three oppositions:

red - green, yellow - blue, light - dark

◮ four types of opponent cells in the macaque’s LGN ◮ Hering’s model and HSL (Munsell) are isomorphic

Roland Mühlenbernd Prototype Semantics Review: Evolut. Approaches to Language Change Relativists VS Universalists Background: Human Color Perception The World Color Survey The Principles Model Homeworks

Research Field Color Categories

The nature of human (non-)linguistic color categories (research field for more than 50 years)

◮ do color terminologies evolve naturally to an optimum

point for communicative and descriptive purposes? (cultural constraints)

◮ are color terminologies determined by perceptive and

cognitive constraints? (biological constraints)

◮ how are linguistic usage/representation and

cognitive/perceptive sensation of colors interrelated?

◮ studies of the late 1970’s resulted in the famous World

Color Survey

Roland Mühlenbernd Prototype Semantics Review: Evolut. Approaches to Language Change Relativists VS Universalists Background: Human Color Perception The World Color Survey The Principles Model Homeworks

Berlin & Kay (1969)

◮ comparison of color term vocabulary in 98 languages by

showing colored chips to participants

◮ focus on basic color terms, which must be

◮ monolexemic (no “lemon-colored” or “blue-green”) ◮ no subsets of other terms (“crimson” → “red”) ◮ not restricted to narrow class of objects (“blonde”) ◮ psychologically salient (most people won’t come up with

“scarlet” when shown a color)

◮ participants were asked to name the colors of their

language, and to select the best fits on a chart of 320 colors

◮ they were then asked to classify the same 320 color chips

isolatedly, resulting in a map of color categories

Roland Mühlenbernd Prototype Semantics Review: Evolut. Approaches to Language Change Relativists VS Universalists Background: Human Color Perception The World Color Survey The Principles Model Homeworks

A Little Experiment

You will see a Munsell Chip and you have to decide if it is Red , Green , White , Yellow , Blue , Black

Roland Mühlenbernd Prototype Semantics Review: Evolut. Approaches to Language Change Relativists VS Universalists Background: Human Color Perception The World Color Survey The Principles Model Homeworks

Result: A Basic Color Term Evolution

Properties of human languages

◮ the number of basic color terms is between 2 and 11(12). ◮ if a language has 11 basic color terms, then the encoded

categories are:

WHITE, BLACK, RED, GREEN, YELLOW, BLUE, BROWN, ORANGE, PINK, PURPLE, and GREY

◮ languages with 11 (12) basic color terms: Arabic

(Lebanese), Bulgarian, English, German, Hebrew, Hungarian (12!), Japanese, Korean, Russian (12!), Spanish, Zuni, ...

◮ if a language has fewer than 11 basic color terms, then

there are strict limitations on which categories it may encode:

◮ only 22 different color vocabularies ◮ can be described by 7 implicative universals ◮ form almost always a partition of the whole space

Roland Mühlenbernd Prototype Semantics Review: Evolut. Approaches to Language Change Relativists VS Universalists Background: Human Color Perception The World Color Survey The Principles Model Homeworks

Exercise 1

Name the two conclusions of the study by Berlin and Kay from 1969?

◮ there are very strong variations among basic color terms of

the languages of the world that indicates cultural relativism

◮ there are strong tendencies to variation inside any

language community, which gives reason to doubt the existence of basic color terms at all

◮ there are universals in color semantics of (probably) all

languages √ (based on one or more of 11 focal colors)

◮ there exist an apparent evolutionary sequence for the

development of the color lexicon √

Roland Mühlenbernd Prototype Semantics Review: Evolut. Approaches to Language Change Relativists VS Universalists Background: Human Color Perception The World Color Survey The Principles Model Homeworks

The Principles Model: Prerequisites

• 1. a small set of perceptual landmarks form the basis of

denotation of major color terms: black, white, red, yellow, green, blue

• 2. languages gain basic color terms in a partially fixed order,

but they never lose a term

Roland Mühlenbernd Prototype Semantics Review: Evolut. Approaches to Language Change Relativists VS Universalists Background: Human Color Perception The World Color Survey The Principles Model Homeworks

The Principles Model: Prerequisites

Partition VS Emergence Hypothesis

◮ Berlin & Kay (1969): all languages’ basic color terms

partition the psychological color space

◮ Emergence Hypothesis: not all languages posses a set of

color terms that partition the perceptual color space

Roland Mühlenbernd Prototype Semantics Review: Evolut. Approaches to Language Change Relativists VS Universalists Background: Human Color Perception The World Color Survey The Principles Model Homeworks

Exercise 2

Bring the principles of Kay and Maffi’s model in the right

• rder:

Principle

• 0. basic color terms jointly partition the perceptual space
• 1. the basic color terms in early stages distinguish between

black and white

• 2. basic color terms distinguish warm primaries from cool

primaries

• 3. basic color terms distinguish the color red among the hue

sensations

Roland Mühlenbernd Prototype Semantics Review: Evolut. Approaches to Language Change Relativists VS Universalists Background: Human Color Perception The World Color Survey The Principles Model Homeworks

The Principles Model

• 0. Partition: in notional domains of cultural salience,

languages tend to assign significata to lexical items in such a way as to partition the denotata of the domain

• 1. Distinguish black and white: the human bw-vision

system is essential and sufficient for shape discrimination and object recognition (color vision is laid on top)

• 2. Distinguish warm from cold primaries : experiments

showed that i) judgment of warm color peak in the orange region (covers red & yellow), whereas cold colors peak in the blue region (cover non-yellowish green and blue), and ii) there is an affinity to the warm-cold boundary

• 3. Distinguish red: experiments showed that the term for red

is the first hue color term that children acquire

Roland Mühlenbernd Prototype Semantics Review: Evolut. Approaches to Language Change Relativists VS Universalists Background: Human Color Perception The World Color Survey The Principles Model Homeworks

The Principles Model in Action

From: Color Appearance and the Emergence and Evolution of Basic Color Lexicons (Kay, Maffi 1999)

• 0. Partition
• 1. Distinguish Black and White
• 2. Distinguish warm (red & yellow) from cold primaries (green & blue)
• 3. Distinguish red

Roland Mühlenbernd Prototype Semantics Review: Evolut. Approaches to Language Change Relativists VS Universalists Background: Human Color Perception The World Color Survey The Principles Model Homeworks

Exercise 3

Given Principles

• 0. Partition
• 1. Distinguish Black & White
• 2. Distinguish warm (R&Y)

from cold primaries (G&Bu)

• 3. Distinguish red

Kay and Maffi describe how the four principles realize the main line of the evolutionary development of basic color lexicons. It is not always the case that ’all’ 4 principles are relevant for any stage transition. Assign which principles are relevant for the following stage transitions: Transition Partition Applied Principles Emergence of stage 1 (W/R/Y)-(Bk/G/Bu) 0, 1 and 2 stage 1 → stage 2 (W)-(R/Y)-(Bk/G/Bu) 0, 1 and 3 stage 2 → stage 3 (W)-(R/Y)-(Bk)-(G/Bu) 0 and 1 stage 3 → stage 4 (W)-(R)-(Y)-(Bk)-(G/Bu) 0 and 3 stage 4 → stage 5 (W)-(R)-(Y)-(Bk)-(G)-(Bu)

Roland Mühlenbernd Prototype Semantics Review: Evolut. Approaches to Language Change Relativists VS Universalists Background: Human Color Perception The World Color Survey The Principles Model Homeworks

Exercise 4

Kay and Maffi show that most of the 110 WCS languages have particular properties in correspondence with their four

• principles. Assign the following properties to the number of

languages (of the wcs) that have this property.

◮ exceptionless operation on partition: 101 ◮ conformity to the four principles in the right order: 90 ◮ conformity to the four principles by order principle 3 over

principles 1 and 2 at one point: 10

Roland Mühlenbernd Prototype Semantics Review: Evolut. Approaches to Language Change Relativists VS Universalists Background: Human Color Perception The World Color Survey The Principles Model Homeworks

Summary

◮ Prototype Semantics: concept formation paradigm to

describe the mental reflection of semantics of a language

◮ The Evolutionary Account & Semantics: according to

(functional factors of) selection dynamics on linguistic variation, the semantic relationships between variants might play an important role

◮ Universals of Semantic Conceptualization: result of innate

human capacities and/or functional/cultural constraints

◮ Basic Color Terms Categorization: classical field of

research in semantics, which involves evolutionary aspects

◮ The Principles Model: explains the evolution of basic

color terms on the basis of cognitive and experimental evidence

Roland Mühlenbernd Prototype Semantics Review: Evolut. Approaches to Language Change Relativists VS Universalists Background: Human Color Perception The World Color Survey The Principles Model Homeworks

Homeworks

◮ Read the article ‘The role of functional factors in language

change’ (Seiler 2006)

◮ solve the appropriate exercises given on ILIAS