Combining Categories

All around us, we find instances where objects like tall man or small elephant combine one or more categories. This was a problem for extensional semantics, where the semantics of a word such as red is to be defined as the set of objects having this property. Clearly, this does not apply so well to modifiers such as small; a small mouse is very different from a small elephant.

These combinations pose a lesser problem in terms of prototype theory. In situations involving adjectives (e.g. tall), one encounters the question of whether or not the prototype of [tall] is a 6 feet tall man, or a 400 feet skyscraper [Dirven and Taylor 1988]. The solution emerges by contextualizing the notion of prototype in terms of the object being modified. This extends even more radically in compounds such as red wine or red hair which are hardly red in the prototypical sense, but the red indicates merely a shift from the prototypical colour of wine or hair respectively. This corresponds to de Saussure's notion of concepts as purely differential: "non pas positivement par leur contenu, mais negativement par leurs rapports avec les autres termes du systeme" [p.162; not positively, in terms of their content, but negatively by contrast with other terms in the same system (tr. Harris 83)].

Other problems remain - e.g. in determining which of the constituent categories will contribute which feature? In the example of a "pet bird" [Hampton 97], pet provides the habitat of the compound (cage rather than the wild), whereas bird provides the skin type (feathers rather than fur).

[edit] Literature

* Berlin, B. & Kay, P. (1969): Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution, Berkeley.
* Dirven, R. & Taylor, J. R. (1988): "The conceptualisation of vertical Space in English: The Case of Tall", in: Rudzka-Ostyn, B.(ed): Topics in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam.
* Lakoff, G. (1987): Women, fire and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind, London.
* Rosch, E. Heider (1973): "Natural categories", Cognitive Psychology 4, 328-350.
* Rosch, E. (1975): “Cognitive reference points”, Cognitive Psychology 7, 532-547.
* Rosch, E. (1978): “Principles of categorization”, in: Rosch, E. & Lloyd, B. B. (eds): Cognition and Categorization. Hillsdale, New Jersey, 27-48.
* Taylor, J. R.(2003): Linguistic Categorization, Oxford University Press.
* Wittgenstein, L. (1997): „Philosophische Untersuchungen“, in: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1, Frankfurt, 225-580.