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Psychological Anthropology, Language & Linguistics, Native Mesoamerican Peoples - Language & Linguistics, Native American Studies - General & Miscellaneous, Native Mesoamerican Peoples - General & Miscellaneous, Cross-Cultural Psychology, Native American
Color and cognition in Mesoamerica by Robert E. MacLaury β€” book cover

Color and cognition in Mesoamerica

by Robert E. MacLaury
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Overview

This book presents the results of the Mesoamerican Color Survey, which Robert E. MacLaury conducted in 1978-1981. Drawn from interviews with 900 speakers of some 116 Mesoamerican languages, the book provides a sweeping overview of the organization and semantics of color categorization in modern Mesoamerica. Extensive analysis and MacLaury's use of vantage theory reveal complex and often surprising relationships among the ways languages categorize colors. His findings offer valuable cross-cultural data for all students of Mesoamerica. In addition, because color and its categorization is a human universal, the model he proposes will be of interest to all linguists and cognitive scientists working on theories of categorization more generally.

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Editorials

Booknews

Though MacLaury (U. of Arizona) does not bear a name drawn from any of the 100 plus indigenous languages of Mexico and Central America, he provides an anthropologist's cross-cultural analysis of the results of his Mesoamerica Color Survey (1978-81). Color in this case refers to cognitive and semantic categories. Because such color categorization is universal, his data-based Vantage Theory should be of interest to linguists and cognitive scientists devising general theories. His modification of the prevailing Berlin-Kay theory of universal focal color order aims to accommodate both unique and related categorization characteristics of languages. Presents conceptual and material equipment, issues in ethnography, typology of relations, glossary, and language index. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Book Details

Published
June 1, 1997
Publisher
Austin : University of Texas Press, 1997.
Pages
616
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780292751934

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