Tahitian Words for Race and Class. Working Papers of the Language Behavior Research Laboratory, No. 40.

This volume is based on field work conducted in 1960 in Papeete and in a rural district of Tahiti, under the guidance of Douglas Oliver. Section two, which is based on a Ph.D. thesis (Kay 1963), develops the hypothesis that Tahitian words for social classification and the common French translations are semantically equivalent for most native speakers of Tahitian. This means that when a French word is used, the Tahitian meaning is intended. Section three, which attempts to relate the data in section two to more recent anthropological research, develops the hypothesis that words designating racial/social types in Brazilian Portuguese do not constitute a shared semantic system which permits native speakers to communicate effectively in this domain. This semantic ambiguity may be due to a desire to slur class and race distinctions. Section four discusses the implications of these hypotheses for semantic theory, and presents research on other sets of words whose meanings seem to imply underlying notions of quantity and statistical distribution. (Author/AM)