Robert E. MacLaury PhD
The Robert E. MacLaury Color Categorization Archive
The Robert E. MacLaury Color Categorization Archive consists of all raw ethnolinguistic survey data obtained from the estate of Robert E. MacLaury. It includes two distinct color surveys, namely, The Mesoamerican Color Survey and MacLaury's Multinational Color Survey. Both surveys employ standardized color "Naming" and category "Focus" tasks employed in the World Color Survey, and most of MacLaury's surveys additionally include category "Mapping" tasks that convey the denotative ranges of color terms elicited from participants in the surveys.
MacLaury's formal training was at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Language Behavior Research Laboratory, 1974-1986, under Drs. Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, at the time when their universalist evolutionary approach to color categorization and naming was breaking ground. Rob was an investigator on the World Color Survey project, and in his PhD research sought to build on the WCS color categorization and naming research by extending its approaches and applying them to a wide range of ethnolinguistic societies.
The Mesoamerican Color Survey
The Mesoamerican Color Survey was conducted by Dr. Robert E. MacLaury between the years 1978 to 1981. It includes interviews with over 900 speakers of some 116 Mesoamerican languages in which color categorization behaviors were collected with a standardized method similar to that used in the World Color Survey (Kay, Berlin, Maffi, Merrifield and Cook 2009). MacLaury's 1997 book on the MSC survey provides a sweeping overview of the organization and semantics of color categorization in modern Mesoamerica from the point of view of Vantage Theory. The raw data files of MacLaury's MCS survey are made publicly available on the ColCat site for the first time.
MacLaury's Multinational Color Survey
Up to the time of his passing in 2004 MacLaury collected color categorization data using lexicons from a variety of linguistic societies across Africa, Europe, The Americas, Asia, and elsewhere. These data are the Multinational Color Survey portion of the MacLaury archive, and include approximately 96 additional surveys. Neither the raw MCS data nor the MacLaury multinational language surveys have been systematically organized for public use or previously published in an unanalyzed form. The additional color categorization surveys (some with only a single informant, while others have many more, with the largest having 40 informants) are valuable for their diversity in that they include native speakers from a wide range of languages including several Slavic languages, Hungarian, several Salishan languages of the Pacific Northwest United States, Zulu and several other South Africa/Zimbabwe languages, several native American languages, Germanic languages, European languages, Asian languages, and more.
Brief Biography and Selected Works
- MacLaury, R.E. (1970). Ayoquesco Zapotec: Ethnography, Phonology, and Lexicon (Master’s Thesis). Retrieved from the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics Library. (OAI Identifier oai:gial.edu:24619)
- MacLaury, R. E. (1986) Color in Mesoamerica, Vol. 1: A Theory of Composite Categorization (Doctoral Dissertation). Retrieved from UMI Dissertation Abstracts Database. (Order No. 8718073)
- MacLaury, R. E. (1987). Color‐Category Evolution and Shuswap Yellow‐with‐Green. American Anthropologist, 89(1), 107-124.
- MacLaury, R. E. (1992). From Brightness to Hue: An Explanatory Model of Color-Category Evolution. Current Anthropology 33 (2): 137–186. doi:10.1086/204049.
- MacLaury, R. E. (1995). Vantage theory. In John R. Taylor and R. E. MacLaury, eds., Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World. [Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs 82.] 231-276. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
- MacLaury, R. E. (1997). Color and Cognition in Mesoamerica: Constructing Categories as Vantages. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. (paperback published in 2011.)
- MacLaury, R. E., Almási, J., & Kövecses, Z. (1997). Hungarian piros and vörös: color from points of view. Semiotica, 114(1-2), 67-82.
- MacLaury, R. E. (2000). Linguistic relativity and the plasticity of categorization. In Pütz, Martin and Marjolijn Verspoor. Explorations in Linguistic Relativity. 251-293. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
- MacLaury, R. E., Paramei, G. V. & Dedrick, D. (Eds.). (2007) Anthropology of Color. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
- MacLaury's publication statistics in Google Scholar.
- Vantage Theory Bibliography by Adam Głaz(.pdf file)
Obituaries
- Society for Anthropological Sciences (.pdf file)
- 'The Ark' (Bay-Area Paper) (.pdf file)
- Progress in Colour Studies (.jpg file)
- Cross-Cultural Research-2005 (.pdf file)
Support for this project was provided, in part, by research awards from The University of California Pacific Rim Research Program, 2010-2015 (K. A. Jameson, PI), and The National Science Foundation 2014-2017 (#SMA-1416907, K.A. Jameson, PI), UC Irvine's Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences, and by UCI’s California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2).
This work is licensed to the Authors under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivatives Works 4.0 International License. December 31, 2018.