La catégorisation linguistique des couleurs: niveaux d'élémentarité des noms de couleurs français

Linguistic categorisation of colours: relative basicness of French colour terms Categorisation is one of the basic cognitive processes. Because of the continuous character of the colour spectrum, colour terms constitute an interesting material to study linguistic categorisation. The first part of this article offers a review of research on the linguistic categorisation of colours, especially on basic colour terms and prototypes. In the second part, the results of an empirical study on the basicness of French colour terms will be presented. The results suggest that colour terms are categorised as prototypically structured concepts, which supports the hypothesis of the relative basicness of colour terms.