Comrie's book on universals and typology

>>_Language Universals And Linguistic Typology_
>
>What you really need to know: It's by Comrie. Thus, it rocks.
[snip]
>It goes into a wider array of phenomena than Payne's work, including the
>famous hierarchy of colour terms, among other memorable moments.
I haven't had the pleasure of reading through
that book yet, but I hope Comrie isn't adhering
there to that much publicized but outdated theory
of colour universals proposed by Berlin & Kay
three decades ago.

Later, much better done and researched studies have
led to substantial changes and refinements to that
initial, quite unconvincing theory (*), providing
much more credible insight into the field of
colour semantics, a summary of which can be found
here:

http://amor.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h2816i3x/LexSemantik2.pdf
(under "The World Color Survey", after
a summary of Berlin & Kay's theory)

(*) According to which the colour semantics of Western
languages happens to be the perfect universal system,
because B&K unashamedly proclaimed those, precisely
and only those, 11 colours to be the innate set of
colour categories of all humans, while the immense
majority of the rest of the languages, which happen
not to adhere to that system, are thus primitive
or imperfect systems that haven't yet reached the
blissful state of perfection that Western languages
already enjoy.


>There's a really interesting bit about the necessary and sufficient
>conditions for subjecthood, comparing English and Russian IIRC, as well
as a
>few other langs.
Interesting. Could you offer us a summary of
those necessary and sufficient conditions that
define subjecthood?

Cheers,
Javier