Abstract
The last decade has witnessed an interest in inheritance hierarchies for the representation of linguistic knowledge. An obvious application is to historical reconstruction of a language family, but this is largely unexplored territory. We demonstrate the merits of such an approach with a default inheritance treatment of the colour terms of Slavonic: Slavonic because it is uncontroversially a genetic unit, and colour terms both because of their universality and because of the tight constraints on a language's colour term inventory (Berlin & Kay 1969, and subsequent work). In section I we discuss the colour terms of Slavonic and introduce Berlin and Kay's typology and the notion of basic colour term. Section 2 describes our methodology and in section 3 we show how it is applied to Slavonic. The main results are discussed in section 4.
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
1999
Repository Citation
Hippisley, Andrew R. and Gazdar, Gerald, "Inheritance hierarchies and historical reconstruction: towards a history of Slavonic colour terms" (1999). Linguistics Faculty Publications. 2.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/lin_facpub/2
