Glossy Black is not actually ‘Black’: Evidence from Psycholinguistic Colour-Naming Studies in 14 European Languages

Abstract

Since Berlin and Kay’s seminal monograph, most studies on colour vocabulary and categorization have concentrated on the three main characteristics of colour – hue, lightness and saturation – which play a major role in the semantics of colour terms. This paper addresses a rarely discussed phenomenon, the appearance and naming of the surface of the colour stimuli, and argues that researchers should pay careful attention to possible unintended consequences when selecting their materials for psycholinguistic experimental (field) work. Until recently, researchers have remained true to examining the main colour characteristics, not observing beyond, in spite of glaring evidence from some less-studied languages. Native speakers of fourteen typologically diverse languages spoken in Europe participated in two colour-naming experiments carried out with Color-Aid or Munsell stimuli. Having a single colour term black in the spotlight, the paper argues that glossiness might be an extra-linguistic feature which contributes to the semantic meaning of a colour term. According to the evidence gathered, black only seems to refer to a non-shiny, matte colour and has therefore been underused for glossy-surfaced stimuli in our datasets, resulting in a risk of elimination from the inventory of basic colour terms due to its low naming frequency and object-relatedness.