Quantifying basic colors' salience from cross-linguistic corpora

Abstract

A corpus-based quantitative assessment of Berlin and Kay's proposal is presented. We refine the Basic Color Terms hierarchy proposed by Berlin and Kay, through the concept of salience. A cross-linguistic study with 57 different languages and 136 different linguistic corpora has been conducted. This study uses KonText tool and the corpora included in it. The color labels in different languages have been obtained using a unified methodology from PanLex. We have obtained an individual hierarchy for each of the languages analyzed, as well as a general hierarchy that captures the universal trend. Results show that there is a close relationship between the evolutionary stages in the Berlin and Kay proposal and their frequency in our corpora study, which we could also relate to Zipf's Law. The only color that we certify behaves differently compared to such a proposal is yellow. The main advantage of our approach compared to previous corpora studies is taking into account the anglocentric bias by using a representative typological set of different languages from the world.