Salience Counts: A Domain Analysis of English Color Terms

Independent models of basic and nonbasic color terms are combined to explore the domain as a whole. We analyze an elicited set of English color terms, ranked by a combined frequency and order of mention salience index. We find that (1) basic color terms emerge intact as a distinctive category, and (2) the remaining types of terms array themselves in an extended pattern of distribution with respect to the domain's broader scheme of lexical, organizational, semantic, and salience dimensions.