Stanley R. Witkowski

MARKING-REVERSALS AND CULTURAL IMPORTANCE

Unmarked terms in the lexicon, compared to marked ones, are typically more frequent in use, less complex in form, and acquired earlier by children learning a language. Terms which are unmarked in single languages are often unmarked in all languages; however, marking is not always invariable across languages, or through time within individual languages. The present work focuses on variation in cultural importance as a factor which influences marking. As the importance of a referent changes within a speech community, the marking value of its label alters, often resulting in lexical change. Introductions of previously unknown referents in culture contact situations-e.g. domestic plants and animals-frequently have led to shifts in cultural importance. Such examples illustrate how cultural factors, by influencing the assignment of marking, often play an important role in lexical change.*

Whorf and Universals of Color Nomenclature

Inherent physical-perceptual distinctiveness plays a large role in color salience. In addition, words for color referents vary in lexical salience in a way that is concordant with the physical-perceptual distinctiveness of these referents. Highly distinctive referents typically receive salient labels, while less distinctive referents receive nonsalient ones. Hence the lexical salience of color words reflects underlying physical-perceptual salience. However, in addition to mirroring physical-perceptual distinctiveness lexical salience also magnifies it. Although language does not set the agenda for color categorization, it greatly augments the salience of color categories. Thus lexical salience plays a crucial mediating and amplifying role between the physical-perceptual distinctiveness of color referents and color behavior. These findings are consistent with both a universalist interpretation of color terminology and a Whorfian hypothesis which asserts that color language exerts an active influence on human thought and behavior.

Societal Complexity and Lexical Growth

In this paper we report a high positive association between societal complexity and size of a languages lexicon in terms of total number of dictionary entries. Small-scale societies have many fewer lexical items than large-scale societies. However, when specialist terms are ex cluded, the correlation between societal complexity and size of lexi con falls off, probably to zero. We also show that languages spoken in societies of varying complexity contain radically different constel lations of lexical items.

Numerical Taxonomy: Old Techniques and New Assumptions [and Comments and Reply]

Numerical taxonomists in biology and scholars in other fields interested in similar classification tasks have used varieties of two techniques: hierarchical clustering and multidimensional scaling. They have tended to treat both kinds of techniques as all-purpose tools suited to all kinds of classification problems. Choices among techniques have been made in terms of which best accounted for inputted data matrices rather than with any attention to the formal properties of the techniques or the empirical problems to which they were being applied. Instead, the choice of technique should be based on the assumptions embodied in our theories of the processes that produce the distribution of the items in question. We should seek techniques that are capable of representing the regularities our theories assert to exist and that are immune to likely sources of error.