M ORFOLOGÍADEL FRUTO

At some point of their critiques, both Lucy (1997) and Saunders (2000; 2007; Saunders and van Brakel, 1997b) accuse the B&K program of some sort of circu- larity or self-conrmation. This criticism is aimed, without clear dierentiation, both at the procedures of collecting and processing data, and at explanatory ideas of the universalists, especially their conception of visual perception. Here I only discuss relevance of such objections for assessment of the WCS data; for the rest, see footnote 26.

I have already dealt with the relativist suspicion that the very use of the Mun- sell color array in the experiment implies that universal engagement of languages

(1997b, p. 217) quote eld comments from the WCS that indicate inuence of English, Spanish, French or Hindi on Agta, Carib, Halbi, Kriol, Mazatec, Papago and Zapotec.

21_{A successful model in these lines will thus not univocally support one side of the universalism-}

relativism opposition as far as the contemporary cross-linguistic reality of color categorization is concerned. That is not a problem, since this opposition does not present, as I have argued, a meaningful either-or question. Instead, the model is meant to specify the role of various factors emphasized by either of the sides.

in color categorization will be found. The conclusion was that with appropri- ate attention to levels of agreement the color array does not impose anything like that. For any particular language, it allows either a rened specication of its color-categorical system, or conclusion to the absence thereof. In that sense, the array should be seen as an ally against universalist interpretative pigeonholing of languages into 9 types (such as [W, R+Y, G+B, Bk]) in 5 evolutionary stages (cf. sections 2.1 and 2.2), not as a means of reading universal order into empirical data on languages. Lucy (1997, p. 334) condenses a good deal of criticism into the following, seemingly devastating remark: The procedure strictly limits each speaker by rigidly dening what will be labeled [1], which labels will count [2], and how they will be interpreted [3]. To use a political metaphor, it is as if one political party were entitled to dictate what you would vote on, to count the votes, and to report what the results meant. But under a scrutiny, the objection falls apart. (1), that is the choice of the Munsell chips, was defended above (3.2.2) and found justied; so was (2), the restriction to basic color terms (3.2.3). (3) is groundless provided that we represent languages with aggregate naming arrays, without further interpretation of their color categories (in case they have any) as red, green-blue, etc., as has been usually done in the B&K program.22

But the relativists are not only worried that the WCS methodology ensures that universals will be found; they also suggest that it somehow generates the specic patterns they grant there to be in the data. After all, as apologists for this tradition often note, it works! These color systems are there! [...] Well, I agree that something is there, but exactly what? [...] This approach [...] not only seeks universals, but sets up a procedure which guarantees both their discovery and their form. (Lucy, 1997, p. 331.) There is plenty of order in the WCS. This order, however, is partly apparent and partly real, and the part that is real is real in dierent senses. Part of the order is created by the method used (the Munsell system) [...] Second, order is created by data processing (Cf. Table 6). (Saunders and van Brakel, 1997b, p. 218.) As we can see, there is no disagreement about the fact that in the WCS data there are some manifest patterns. To mention some that are not intuitive from the western perspective, these patterns include a cross- linguistic tendency to merge (what we call) green and blue into one category, and to a lesser extent also red and yellow.23 _{The relativists do not deny such strong}

tendencies in the data, but they suggest that they are an artifact of the chosen

22_{Cf. Lucy, 1997, p. 334: So when a category is identied now [on the Munsell color array],}

it is really the investigator who decides which color (or composite color) it will count as.

23_{Especially the rst of these generalizations seems to be so strong that it can be safely}

expected to survive the reduction of the empirical WCS basis to its reliable core which is being proposed in the present chapter. Hence, I occasionally mention merging green and blue in a single category as an example of a salient cross-linguistic pattern of color categorization, without further qualications.

method.

However, very little justication is given for such a strong claim. Virtually no argument is oered that would specify how exactly is the WCS methodology supposed, for instance, to encourage categorical merging of blue with green and to suppress merging of blue with red. This is not to deny that, in the data pro- cessing stage, there may have been individual, atomic cases where a problematic data point was treated in compliance with universalist preconceptions. For in- stance, if there were two or more names for a particular chip equally agreed on, the researcher might have inclined to record in the aggregate naming array that name which best tted the contemporary universalist picture of color categoriza- tion. (Cf. explicit tables of ties in Kay et al., 2009.) But the room that was present in the WCS for distortion of this kind is nothing but marginal compared to robustness of the patterns in the data (which, to remind, reect over half a million atomic acts of naming a color chip). Saunders' (2007, p. 472) complaint that The `data' [...] contain countless examples of the inuence of prior expec- tations, colonialism and global standards, as also of `outliers' discarded because they did not t the preconceptions of the investigators can be rejected: in part as exaggerating rhetoric, in part as referring to the practices of the universalist interpretation of the WCS data which we discard as well.

Saunders and van Brakel's (1997b) Table 6, which presents a collection of potentially subversive eld comments from the WCS, seems to be the most concrete indication of how the relativists suppose that universal patterns are created during the data processing. Some of the included comments only illustrate the inuence of culturally dominant languages, which I approvingly discussed above. But the rest fails to support the relativist point, since nearly all of these comments are disarmed once we subscribe to representing languages by means of the higher agreement aggregate naming arrays, not modal agreement (see section 3.2.2). For instance, comments are quoted which state that in Kalam [t]he naming of black is surprisingly inconsistent. The most common black term (S) is only used by eleven informants. Seven other terms are used for black including the white term (T) once, the green term (K) twice and the blue term (M) four times, or that in Tifal, There are six words for red with none especially more prominent than the others. In perfect compliance with these observations, the aggregate naming array for Kalam on the 52% level of agreement displays no marks of an established category in the black region, and the array for Tifal on the same agreement level displays no marks of an established category in red.