Color and cognition in Mesoamerica

About this book

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.