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Paul Kay, Berkeley
Paul Kay's Home Page
International Computer Science Institute
1947 Center Street
Berkeley, California, 94704, USA
paulkay at berkeley dot edu
Professor Emeritus, Department of Linguistics
University of California, Berkeley
Consulting Professor, Department of Linguistics
Stanford University
Curriculum Vitae for P.K.(PDF)
My research interests, within the broad area of cognitive science,
center around language, its structure, and its relation to thought
and perception. Specifically, most of my research concerns either
color naming or grammatical structure.
BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT
The World Color Survey. Paul Kay, Brent Berlin, Luisa Maffi,
William R. Merrifield, and Richard Cook. Stanford: Center for the
Study of Language and Information (2009). 618 pp. 8.5" x 11"
hardcover.
Over 800 Tables and Diagrams. $90 USD. Paperback version at Amazon for
$49. Just the thing for that
special someone!
DOWNLOADABLE PAPERS ON COLOR NAMING AND RELATED TOPICS
Synchronic variability and diachronic change
in basic color terms. Paul Kay (1975) Language in Society,
4, 257-270.
The linguistic significance of the meanings of basic color terms. Paul
Kay & Chad K. McDaniel. (1978) Language. 54, 610-646.
What is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?
Paul Kay & Willett Kempton (1984) American Anthropologist, 86,
65-79.
Color naming across languages. Paul Kay, Brent Berlin,
Luisa Maffi, and William Merrifield. C.L. Hardin and L.
Maffi (eds.), Color Categories in Thought and Language .
Cambridge.
1997
Science ≠ Imperialism:
There are non-trivial constraints on color
categorization.
Paul Kay & Brent Berlin.
Brain and Behavioral Sciences.
20, 196-201. 1997.
The emergence of basic color lexicons hypothesis: A
comment on John Lyons'
"The vocabulary of colour with particular reference to
Ancient Greek and Classical Latin." Paul Kay. The Language of Color in the Mediterranean. Alexander
Borg (editor). Stockholm. Almqvist and Wiksell International.
1999.
Color Categorization. Paul
Kay.
The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences,
Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil (eds.). This is an
encyclopedia article with 3.5 pages of text and 5 pages of
bibliography. (1999)
Methodological Issues in Cross-Language
Color Naming(postscript).
Methodological Issues in Cross-Language Color Naming.(pdf)
Paul Kay.
First appeared in French as La recherche interlinguistique sur les noms
de couleur: Quelques considérations méthodologiques. Anthropologie et
Sociétés
23, 69-90 (1999). English version appeared in Language,
Culture and Society, Ed.
by Christine Jourdan and Kevin Tuite. Cambridge University Press
(2006) pp 115-134.
Color Appearance and the Emergence and
Evolution of Basic Color Lexicons. Paul Kay and Luisa Maffi.
American Anthropologist.
(1999)101:743-760.
Asymmetries in the Distribution of Composite
and Derived Basic Color Categories. Paul Kay. Comment [4 pages]
on a paper by Stephen Palmer, entitled Color, Consciousness and the
Isomorphism Constraint, to appear in Behavioral and Brain
Sciences. (1999) 22:957-958.
Color. Paul Kay. A 1500 word, encyclopedia
style article in a special edition of the Journal of
Linguistic Anthropology, edited by Alessandro Duranti.
(1999) 1:29-32.
The Linguistics of Color Terms. Paul
Kay. A 3000 word entry for the International Encyclopedia
of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, ed. by Neil J. Smelser and Paul
B. Baltes. Amsterdam, NY: Elsevier. 2001.
Color Categories are Not Arbitrary.(pdf)
Paul Kay. Cross Cultural Research (2005) 39, 39-55
Individual
differences in unique and binary hues [Abstract](html).Gokhan
Malkoc, Paul Kay, and Michael A. Webster Journal of Vision 2, 32
(2002).
Resolving
the question of color naming universals(pdf). Paul Kay and Terry
Regier.Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 100, 9085-9089 (2003).
Color naming and sunlight: Commentary on Lindsey
and Brown (2002)(pdf). Terry Regier and Paul Kay.
Psychological Science. 15, 289-290 (2004).
Color naming, lens aging, and grue:
What the optics of the aging eye can teach us about color language(pdf).
Joseph L. Hardy, Christina M. Frederick, Paul Kay, and John S.
Werner. Psychological Science (2005) 16, 321-327.
Individual and Population
Differences in Focal Colors(pdf).
Michael A. Webster and Paul Kay.
In Anthropology of Color, ed. by
Robert E. MacLaury, Galina V. Paramei and Don Dedrick. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins. pp. 29-53.
(2007)
Variations in color naming within and
across populations [commentary on Steels and Belpaeme](pdf).
Michael A. Webster and Paul Kay. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28,
512-513.
2005. Link to full BBS article, with all commentaries:
here
Focal colors are universal after all
(pdf, preprint).Terry Regier, Paul Kay and Richard S. Cook.
Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences 102:8386-8391 (2005).
The World Color Survey Database: History and
Use(pdf). Richard S. Cook, Paul Kay, and Terry Regier.
In
Cohen, Henri and Claire Lefebvre
(eds.) Handbook of Categorisation in the
Cognitive Sciences. Elsevier. (2005)
Variations in normal color vision.IV.
Binary hues and hue scaling.(pdf)Gokhan Malkoc, Paul Kay and
Michael A. Webster. J.Opt. Soc. Am. A. 22, 2154-2168 (2005). Cardinal
points of cone opponent space do not correspond to unique RYGB
judgments, nor do
RYGB unique hue choices predict intermediate binaries.
Universal foci and varying boundaries in linguistic color
categories. Terry Regier, Paul Kay, and Richard S. Cook (2005). In B. G. Bara, L. Barsalou and M. Bucciarelli (Eds.)
Proceedings of the 27th Annual Conference of the Cognitive
Science
Society.
Color naming universals: the case of Berinmo.
Paul Kay and Terry Regier. ms. The color naming data of Berinmo and
other 5-term languages exemplify universal tendencies in cross-language
color naming.Cognition. 2007 Feb;102(2):289-98. Epub 2006 Feb 7
Language, thought and color: recent developments.
Paul Kay and Terry Regier. TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.10 No.2
February 2006. A brief survey of recent
developments in research on color
naming and color cognition suggests that the popular
opposition of 'relativist'
versus 'universalist' approaches conceals, rather than clarifies,
interesting new questions.
Whorf hypothesis is supported in the
right visual field but not the left. Aubrey L. Gilbert, Terry
Regier, Paul Kay, and Richard B. Ivry. Target colors of different
lexical category from distractors are found faster than targets of
the
same lexical category as distractors,
but only in right visual field (which feeds
the left cerebral
hemisphere.)
Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences.
103, 489-494. (2005).
Further evidence that Whorfian effects are
stronger in the right visual field than the left.
G. V. Drivonikou,
P. Kay, T. Regier, R. B. Ivry, A. L. Gilbert, A. Franklin, and I. R.
L. Davies. Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences. 104, 1097-1102. (2007).
Color Naming is Near Optimal. Terry
Regier, Paul Kay & Naveen Khetarpal. In D. S. McNamara and J. G.
Trafton (Eds.), Proceedings of the 29th Annual Conference of the
Cognitive Science Society. (2007).
Color naming reflects optimal partitions of
color space. T. Regier, P. Kay, and N. Khetarpal. Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences. 104, 1436-1441. (2007).
Support for lateralization of the
Whorf effect beyond the realm of color discrimination. (in press)
Aubrey
Gilbert, Terry Regier, Paul Kay, & Richard B. Ivry. Brain and
Language. (2007).
Lateralized Whorf: Language influences
perceptual decision in the right visual field (2009) Paul Kay, Terry
Regier, Aubrey L. Gilbert, & Richard B. Ivry.
In James W. Minett and William S-Y. Wang, eds. Language,
Evolution, and the Brain. Hong Kong: The City University of
Hong Kong Press.
Language affects patterns of brain
activation
associated with perceptual decision
Li Hai Tan, Alice H. D. Chan, Paul
Kay,
Pek-Lan Khong, Lawrance K. C. Yip, and Kang-Kwong
Luke. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105,
4004-4009 (2008).
Categorical perception of color is lateralized
to the
right hemisphere in infants, but to the left
hemisphere in adults. A. Franklin, G. V. Drivonikou, L.
Bevis, I. R. L. Davies, P. Kay, and T. Regier. Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences, 105, 3221-3225 (2008).
Why colour words are really ... colour
words [Comment on a paper by Anna Wierzbicka claiming that there
can be no color term universals because many languages lack a word for
'color'] Paul Kay and Rolf G. Kuehni. Journal of
the Royal Anthropological Institute. 14, 886-887. June 2008.
Lateralization of categorical
perception of color
changes with color term acquisition A. Franklin, G. V.
Drivonikou, A. Clifford, P. Kay, T. Regier, and I. R. L. Davies.
Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences, 105: 18221-18225 (2008).
Language regions of brain are operative
in color perceptionWai Ting Siok, Paul Kay, William S. Y.
Wang, Alice H. D. Chan, Lin Chen, Kang-Kwong Luke,
& Li Hai Tan.
Proceedings of
the National Academy of
Sciences www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0903627106. (2009)
Lateralized Whorf: Language influences perceptual
decision in
the right visual field. Paul Kay, Terry Regier, Aubrey L. Gilbert, &
Richard B. Ivry. In: Minett, James W. &
Wang, William S-Y., eds. Language, Evolution, and the
Brain.
Hong Kong : City University of Hong Kong Press. (2009, pp.
261--284)
Language, thought and color: Whorf was half
right. Terry Regier and Paul Kay. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 28 August 2009.
doi:10.1016/j.tics.2009.07.001.
Language and thought: Which side are
you on, anyway? Terry Regier, Paul Kay, Aubrey Gilbert, and
Richard Ivry. In B. Malt and P. Wolff (Eds.), Words and the
Mind: Perspectives on the Language-Thought Interface. New York:
Oxford University Press (2010).
Comment on Daniel L. Everett: Cultural Constraints on Grammar and
Cognition in Pirahã. Paul Kay (2005) Current
Anthropology 46, 636-637.
Color naming and the shape of color
space. Terry Regier, Paul Kay & Naveen Khertapal.
Language 85,
884-892 (2009).
Newly trained lexical categories produce
lateralized categorical perception of color. Ke Zhou, Lei Mo, Paul
Kay, Veronica P.Y. Kwok, Tiffany N.M. Ip, & Li Hai Tan (2010).
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107,
9974-9978.
Electrophysiological evidence for the
left-lateralized
effect of language on preattentive categorical
perception of color. Lei Mo, Guiping Xua, Paul Kay,
and Li-Hai Tan (2011) Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences. early edition:
www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1111860108.
Color categories and color appearance. Michael A.
Webster and Paul Kay (2012) Cognition. 122, 375-392.
Perceiving the average hue of color
arrays. Jacquelyn Webster, Paul Kay, & Michael A. Webster.Jl. Opt. Soc.
Am. A. 34 (1): 283-292. (2014)
The World Color Survey (encyclopedia
chapter). Paul Kay & Richard Cook. Encyclopedia of Color Science
and Technology. Ronier Luo (Ed.) Springer. (in press/preparation).
Universality of color categorization. Paul Kay. To appear
in Handbook of Color Psychology. Andrew J. Elliot & Mark D. Fairchild eds.). Cambridge
University Press.
Word meanings across languages support efficient
communication.. Terry Regier, Charles Kemp, and Paul Kay. Cross-language modeling of the
lexical domains of color
and kinship supports the hypothesis that languages provide a vehicle for
efficient communication.
Language-internal analysis of a lexical domain represented with binary features
suggests that
the same general model of efficient communiction may
apply cross-linguistically to domains of this type as well. (This is the authors' version
of the work. It is posted here for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive
version will be published by Wiley.)
Candoshi Color
Terms. Paul Kay. Comment on A. Surrallés (2016) On contrastive perception and
ineffabillity: assessing sensory experience without colour terms in an Amazonian
society. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 22, 1-18.
Contrary to Surrallés's claim, the Candoshi language does have color
terms.
PAPERS ON CONSTRUCTION GRAMMAR AND RELATED TOPICS
An Informal Sketch of a Formal
Architecture for Construction Grammar, Paul Kay. A shorter version
appeared in the proceedings of the Conference on Formal Grammar,
HPSG and Categorial Grammar, Saarbrueken, August 1998. Final version
appeared (2002) in Grammars 5, 1-19.
Grammatical Constructions and Linguistic
Generalizations: the What's X Doing Y? Construction
Paul Kay and Charles J. Fillmore. To appear in Language,
December 1998. APPEARED MAY 1999.
Comprehension deficits of Broca's aphasics
provide no evidence for traces Paul Kay. To appear in Behavioral and
Brain Sciences as a commentary on 'The neurology of syntax:
Language use without Broca's area' by Yosef Grodzinsky. APPEARED
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23 (1), 40-41 (2000)
English Subjectless Tagged Sentences (pdf)
To appear in Language, June 2002. Appeared: Nov 2002.
Paul Kay.
ms. ca. 35 pp. single-spaced, 10 pt. type. Analysis of sentences like
Fooled you, didn't they?, where missing root subject reference
is recovered from the reference of the tag subject, although the
antecedent fails to c-command, or show any form of syntactic
superiority to, its dependent.(Language version is somewhat revised
from web version.)
Pragmatic Aspects of Grammatical
Constructions(pdf)
Pragmatic Aspects of Grammatical Constructions
(postscript)
Paul Kay. To appear in Handbook of
Pragmatics edited by Laurence Horn and Gregory Ward, Blackwell. Appeared
2004.
Argument Structure Constructions and the
Argument-Adjunct Distinction (postscript)
Argument Structure Constructions and the
Argument-Adjunct Distinction (pdf)
Paul Kay.(2005) In
Grammatical Constructions: Back to the Roots M. Fried and H.
Boas (eds.) Amsterdam: Benjamins. pp. 71-98.
The Limits of Construction Grammar
(pdf)
Paul Kay.[ Argues for
distinguishing true (productive) grammatical constructions from
"patterns of coining", synchronically UNproductive templates for
forming idioms.] In G. Trousdale & T. Hoffmann (eds.), The
Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar. Oxford University Press. 2013.
Constructional meaning and
compositionality(pdf)
Paul Kay and Laura A. Michaelis.
(2012) In C. Maienborn, K. von Heusinger and P. Portner, eds. Semantics: An
International
Handbook of Natural Language Meaning, HSK Handbooks of Linguistics and
Communication Science
Series: 23: Semantics and Computer Science. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter.
How hard a problem would this be to
solve?(pdf)
Paul Kay and Ivan A. Sag.
Proceedings of the
HPSG09 Conference. Ed. by Stefan Müller. Department of
Linguistics, Stanford
University. CSLI Publications. (2009)
http://csli-publications.stanford.edu.
Introducing Sign-Based Construction Grammar
(pdf)
Ivan A. Sag, Hans C. Boas, and Paul Kay. Sign-Based Construction
Grammar Ed. by Hans C. Boas and Ivan A. Sag. CSLI Publications. (2012).
Unary phrase structure rules and the Cognitive Linguistics lexical
linking theory(pdf)
Paul Kay. Commentary on paper by Stefan Müller and
Stephen Wechsler: Lexical approaches to agrument structure, in Theoretical
Linguistics Volume 40, Issue 1-2 (Jul 2014), edited by Hans-Martin Gaertner.
A lexical theory of phrasal idioms (pdf)
Paul Kay, Ivan
A. Sag, and Dan Flickinger. (in progress) This paper is a revised
version of a paper with the same title by Kay & Sag.
Partial inversion in English (pdf)
Paul
Kay & Laura A. Michaelis. Comments are
welcome. Please don't cite without permission.
A few words to do with multiword expressions
(pdf)
Paul Kay & Laura A. Michaelis. This is a chapter for a planned
festschrift for Lauri Karttunen.
Lessons from the English auxiliary system. Journal
of Linguistics
Sag, I.A., Chaves, R.P., Abeillé, A., Estigarribia, B., Flickinger, D., Kay,
P., Michaelis, L.A., Mueller, S., Pullum, G.K., Van Eynde, F. and Wasow, T.,
Lessons from the English auxiliary system. Journal of Linguistics, 2020. pp.1-69.
Unrealized Arguments in Sign-Based
Construction Grammar.
Rui P. Chaves, Paul Kay, and Laura A. Michaelis. (2020) Proceedings of
the 27th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Stefan Müller and
Petya Osenova eds.
Copy Raising as a lexical rule.
Paul Kay. (2021)
In Stefan Müller and Nurit Melnik eds. Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on
Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. 2021: 68-82.
This page partially updated May 30, 2019.