The basic color terms of Russian* - Walter de Gruyter

86 /. Davies and G. Corbett
relatively frequently in the list task by the British — almost half the
sample offered it — but used infrequently in the naming task. Even when
it was used, it was with little consensus, as indicated by its wide distribution
of cooccurrence scores in Table 8.
4. Discussion
In the introduction we said that the probable basic color terms of Russian
are the following:
belyj 'white', cernyj 'black', krasnyj 'red', zelenyj 'green', zeltyj 'yellow',
sinij 'dark blue', goluboj 'light blue', koricnevyj 'brown 9 , fioletovyj 'purple',
rozovyj 'pink', oranzevyj Orange', seryj 'gray'.
The main questions were whether sinij 'dark blue' and goluboj 'light blue'
were both basic, and whether fioletovyj 'purple' was definitely the basic
term for the purple region. Our data support the claim that the 12 terms
we give above are all basic, including goluboj and fioletovyj. However,
sirenevyj 'mauve' also achieves high scores.
This claim for the basic status of the 12 terms given above is most
clearly supported by the data from the list task. These terms are each
offered by more people than any other term, and there is a reasonably
clear "step" between the least frequent of these twelve — seryj 'gray' —
which was offered by 69% of the sample, and the most frequent of the
remaining terms — sirenevyj 'mauve' — which was offered by 52% of
the sample. The list position measure does not achieve such a clean
separation between the 12 terms we claim are basic and the rest, but even
so it is just koricnevyj 'brown' and seryj 'gray' that have lower mean
positions than a few nonbasic terms, such as sirenevyj 'mauve' and
bordovyj 'claret'. The list position measure is perhaps less reliable than
the list frequency measure, because a term with a low frequency can still
achieve a high list position if the few people who do offer it offer it early
in their lists.
Most of the 12 putative basic terms also have high frequency of naming
scores. The exceptions are belyj 'white' and cernyj 'black'. In addition,
however, sirenevyj 'mauve' has the seventh highest frequency of use in
tile naming. But what indicates that the two achromatic terms are definitely
basic, whereas sirenevyj is probably not, are the measures of consensus
across respondents. There are just 13 terms that have dominance
scores greater than zero; that is, there is at least one tile for which half
or more of the sample use a given term; these are the 12 putative basic
terms plus sir envyj 'mauve'. But sirenevyj 'mauve' only just achieves