Naming the Rainbow

Is there a universal biolinguistic disposition for the development of "basic" colour words? This question has been a subject of debate since Brent Berlin and Paul Kay's "Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution" was published in 1969. This text is an extended study of this debate. The author describes and criticizes empirically and conceptually unified models of colour naming that relate basic colour terms directly to perceptual and ultimately to physiological facts, arguing that this strategy has overlooked the cognitive dimension of colour naming. He proposes a psychosemantics for basic colour terms which is sensitive to cultural difference and to the nature and structure of non-linguistic experience.