Paul Kay
Professor Emeritus

color naming and perception, grammar, lexicon
Languages: English, French
B.A., Tulane; Ph. D., Harvard

Group: Language & Cognition

Contact information

Office: ICSI
Email: paulkay@berkeley.edu
Office phone: (510) 666-2885
Alternate phone: (510) 685-5823
Fax: (510) 666-2956

Web site: http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~kay

Mailing address:
ICSI, 1947 Center St., Suite 600
Berkeley, CA 94704
Berkeley, CA 94720

Personal statement

Ph.D. Social Anthropology, Harvard University, 1963. After a year's postdoctoral research at Stanford University sponsored by the Social Science Research Council, a year's teaching at MIT and a year's fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, he joined the Berkeley Anthropology Department in 1966, where he remained until moving to the Department of Linguistics in 1982. His research has covered many topics in linguistics and linguistic anthropology, including lexical semantics, sociolinguistics, variation theory, semantics, syntax and pragmatics. Particular areas of emphasis of his research have included the cross-language color naming and color perception and the encoding of contextual relations in rules of grammar. Details on color naming research are available on the World Color Survey web page, http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/wcs.

Selected publications

1997. Words and the Grammar of Context. Center for the Study of Language and Information: Stanford, California: Stanford University. 263 pp.

1999. "Color appearance and the emergence and evolution of basic color lexicons." (Kay, Paul and Luisa Maffi) American Anthropologist 101, 743-760,

2002. "English subjectless tagged sentences." (Kay, Paul) In Language 78, 453-481.

2003. "Resolving the question of color naming universals." (Kay, Paul and Terry Regier) In Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 100, 0985-9089.

2006a Color naming universals: the case of Berinmo. Paul Kay and Terry Regier. Cognition. 102(2):289-98.

2006b Language, thought and color: recent developments. Paul Kay and Terry Regier. TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.10 No.2

 2007a 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.

2007b 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.

Full CV