Índice de saliência e dominância em Termos Básicos de Cores: análise comparativa entre Português e Libras

Abstract

The basic color terms were defined based on criteria proposed by the anthropological linguists Berlin and Kay (B&K) in 1969, and resulted in the following colors also called focal colors, like in Portuguese: white, black, red, green, yellow , blue, brown, purple, pink, orange and gray, terms that constitute, according to the authors, the semantic universal of color and appear in a gradual order, in which white and black head this order and purple, gray, pink and orange at the end. Each of these terms constitutes the best example of each color category as they name those categories. There is a possibility that the number of terms is different between languages, but there are indications of a universal sharing of repertoire related to colors that varies, necessarily, between 2 and 11 terms mentioned above. Although the debate over categorization of basic color terms is wide with oral languages, as evidenced by recurrent studies in Kay (1975); Kay & McDaniel (1978); Kay, Berlin & Merrifield (1991); Kay & Maffi (1999); Kay & Regier (2006); Kay & Regier (2007); Taylor, J.R (1995); Davies & Corbett (1994), we still have little information related to sign languages (cf. Zeshan & Sagara, 2016, with the main studies on color terminology in sign languages). In this sense, this research intends to verify if in the Brazilian Sign Language there are restrictions and the universal repertoire of color proposed by the B&K Theory about categorization of basic terms for colors, as well as to compare if there are traces of divergence and convergence with Portuguese - This is a comparative descriptive behavioral study, in which these two languages of different modality will be investigated. The proposed study is unprecedented in Brazil, mainly because it intends to use behavioral tasks with a large sample based on the description, survey and analysis of data based on the theoretical-methodological assumptions of Hollman and Uuskula (2012) and Hollman (2010). Two tasks were performed: one for naming and the other for listing colors. The results of the analysis indicated that the basic color TBCs were more salient in both languages. Primary and secondary color groupings were also found, except for the terms brown and pink in Libras. The results confirm the salience of TBCs and identify the best examples of these color terms in both languages.