semantics

SEMANTIKA ENGLESKOGA JEZIKA

• m e n t a l i s m implies that phenomena within language have a mental basis, which means
that language is not seen exclusively as an abstract system existing on its own
• a n t i – m e n t a l i s m implies that language is seen as a structure which is in no way related
to any kind of psychological attributes of the human being
• t h e o r i e s have an explanatory function; they systemise the data according to the general
principles; on the basis of this systematisation things become clearer
• m e t h o d o l o g y is a set of methods by means of which the postulates of the theory are,
hopefully, proven
• l i n g u i s t i c c o n t e x t: immediate syntagmatic environment in which a linguistic
element can appear (+ non-linguistic context + context of situation)

• l i n g u i s t i c s: the scientific study of language (language is seen as an abstract system)

• 1916, Saussure’s “Course on General Linguistics” = the beginning of linguistics as a science,
and the beginning of structural linguistics
• it is the scientific study of language which aims at explaining how language functions
• language is seen as a unique system/structure whose basic principles are identified, explained
and can then be applied to all languages
• he distinguished between synchronic and diachronic research
• he distinguished between ‘langue’, ‘parole’ and ‘langage’ (the totality of the linguistic
phenomena)
• he started distinguishing between the psychological and sociological reality of language
• linguistic sign is comprised of form and content (signifié and signifiant)
• paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations
o syntagmatic – linear; they are combinatory sequences determined by the two sets of
rules: those that determine how sequence can appear, and those that are deliminated
by possible choices
o paradigmatic – all the possibilities within language that can be interchanged on the
syntagmatic level
o they pose a unity, i.e. function in unison
• structuralism developed in two major mainstreams
o European
o American
 based on the psychological theory of behaviourism
 very radical kind of anti-mentalism
• basic levels of linguistic analysis from the traditional point of view (i.e. what linguistics deals
with):
o phonology
o morphology
o syntax
o lexicology
o semantics (studies the structure above individual words/phrases)
• impact on other humanities: they could function as a legitimate scientific disciplines

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• s e m i o t i c s: the scientific study of signs
• Ogden and Richards:
o semioticians intrigued by meaning in natural languages
o “The Meaning of Meaning” (1923): came up with 22 definitions of meaning
o something radical should be done, through analytical rigour – meaning must have
some kind of structure; they say that analytical rigour is the only way out within any
linguistic discipline that deals with meaning
o knowledge of the language and of the world depends on a cultural background and
on the direction of the development of a language
 eng.: trot > canter > gallop = hrv.: kas > ? > galop => lexical gap
 galop je posuđenica iz engleskog jer to nije bila primarna uloga konja u
Hrvatskoj
o triangle
 symbol is any item of language REFERENCE
 reference (‘thought’) is a mental
vision that we get when someone
says something
 referent is a real word entity SYMBOL REFERENT
meaning can be seen as a

process; it is not an entity
 there is an arbitrary relation
between a symbol and a referent
• Ullmann • Pierce
SENSE LEXICAL CONCEPT
knowledge knowledge
of of
language the world
NAME THING LEXEME DENOTATUM

• the basic f u n c t i o n s o f l a n g u a g e (Leech)

o informational
 based on the assumption that the primary reason is to convey
information
 connected with conceptual meaning
o expressive
 use of language for expressing one’s attitudes and feelings
 connected with affective meaning
o directive
 we aim to influence the behaviour and attitudes of others (e.g. demands
and requests)
 speech acts: we act through speech and get people to do something;
legal acts (‘I baptise you...’; ‘I pronounce you...’; etc.); for demands –
using questions
o aesthetic
 covers various uses of language found in poetry, fiction and various
aesthetic uses
 use for the sake of the linguistic artefact itself
o phatic (Malinowski)

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  social relations with people kept on a good level – keeps their
communication lines
 an intricate system which provides all the social information, so we can
coexist with other people
 today put alongside the informational function: they cover the majority
of our verbal exchanges
 language has strong social and cultural underline; it is our most powerful
tool (we learn the rules as we grow up)

• s e m a n t i c s: the scientific study of meaning (a clear definition of meaning does not exist)
• formal semantics: a group of theoretical assumptions of meaning based on formal logic and
mathematics
• functional semantics: a non-formal linguistic approach to meaning
• syntactic semantics: when we put a word in a sentence, we get a change of meaning
• Reising
o in 1839 wrote a very comprehensive book on Latin verbs
o said that dealing with verbs was impossible without incorporating meaning
o was first to make generalised statements regarding syntax and semantics of Latin
verbs
• M. Bréal
o stresses the need for a separate discipline dealing with meaning, and he calls it for
the first time semantics
o in 1897 he writes his famous “Essay on Semantics”: official beginning of semantics
as a linguistic discipline
o semantics should be seen as the integral part of any linguistic study; without it,
descriptions are unproductive and do not serve to understand how language
functions
• the related disciplines of semantics (from the traditional point of view):
o philology
 a diachronical approach to languages, a descriptive way of viewing
languages until the beginning of the 20th century
 its aim is to describe different notions in a vast number of mainly Indo-
European languages
 philology > etymology + syntax (seen as a descriptive discipline)
o etymology
 part of philology; predecessor of contemporary semantics
 deals with how words change in form and meaning over time
 primarily a diachronic discipline
 e.g. brijati: change in form (brijati se > brijati) and meaning (brijati =
brijati bradu > brijati = misliti, i sl.)
o lexicology
 analysis of the lexemes of a language (i.e. the meaning of one
phonological sequence) and of certain set phrases
o lexicography
 scientific dissection of all the types of knowledge that we need to have
in order to produce a dictionary
 dictionaries: monolingual, bilingual, encyclopaedic (more scientific

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 information, extra information, pictures, etc; e.g. Webster’s), thesaurus
(conceptual dictionary; the basis of the organisation are the clusters of
concepts)
 a good dictionary has two functions: to unveil anything one does not
know, and to unveil a new meaning one does not know yet
 linguistic corpora
□ provide objective data for analysing linguistic phenomena
□ 1st corpus: Brown Corpus (1960s), 1 million items amassed
from 18 different kinds of texts
□ The National British Corpus: the biggest, more than 100
million items
□ The Bank of English: 200 million items
□ concordance: a list of examples that are represented in
context
o stylistics
 text/discourse analysis in written and spoken language, applying to any
kind of text, whereas traditional definition related it specifically to
literature
 dealing with varieties of style
• the oldest, traditional notions of semantics
o they more or less successfully describe some kind of phenomena, but do not explain
how these phenomena (i.e. their semantic side, their meaning) actually function in
language, nor where they come from
o synonymy
 absolute
□ completely same meaning
□ rare or even non-existent due to limited combinatory
possibilities (of phonemes in words)
□ John Lyons: three criteria have to be satisfied by absolute
synonymy
1) synonyms are fully synonymous if all their meanings are identical
2) synonyms are totally synonymous if and only if they are synonymous an all
contexts
3) synonyms are completely synonymous if and only if they are identical in all
relevant dimensions of meaning
□ his examples:
radio = wireless (still used in Australian English: has a dialectal/stylistic meaning);
airport (today: with accompanying facilities, standard civil place for air traffic) =
airfield (today: for military purposes, or merely a strip of land) = aerodrome (today:
found in technical manuals) > differences in the dimension of meaning
□ Croatian examples: apoteka = ljekarna; muzika = glazba, sustav =
sistem...
 partial
□ large & big: distinguished by the collocational range
□ flaw (personal) & defect (mechanical) & blemish (skin
complex): collocational range, and context (experience)
□ huge & enormous & gigantic & colossal: difference in
expressive meaning
o polysemy
 one word has several related meanings

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  e.g. neck (of a person, of a bottle, of a shirt...), bat (animal, baseball bat)
 synchronic resemblance – we as speakers recognise it, feel it
instinctively
 these native-speaker feelings are based on metaphorical extensions
(popular etymology)
 conceptual background of polysemy
o homonymy
 one word has more than one unrelated meaning
 absolute homonyms
□ e.g. bank = financial institution / side of a river
□ criteria to be fulfilled
1) their forms must be unrelated in meaning
2) all their forms must be identical
3) identical forms must be syntactically equivalent
 if the above criteria are not met, then we talk about partial homonyms
□ e.g. ‘They found hospitals and charitable institutions.’
(found = p.t. of ‘to find’ / inf. ‘to found’) = partial homonymy
often gives rise to ambiguity
□ e.g. ‘The bell was rung at midnight.’ / ‘A rung in the ladder
was broken.’ (verb / noun)
o three groups of the theories of semantics
 structuralistic approach: lexemes learnt on the basis of their relationship to others
 cognitive approach: lexical concepts behind words learnt
 meaning explained with the help of other sciences (denotatum)

• m e a n i n g is all-prevailing; “...meaning will escape any cage you put it in...” (J. Samson)
• meaning is totally out of structures, and structures are totally devoid of meaning (Bloomfield,
“Language”, 1933)
• words have meanings, but one cannot scientifically define them without other sciences
interfering (e.g. salt = NaCl)
• different types of meaning:
o conceptual
 the central factor in linguistic communication
 enables us to use and understand a certain word
 it changes through time – it’s not fixed, it is dynamic
 an open-ended list of possible features
o secondary
 stylistic
□ what is communicative of the social circumstances of the
language used
□ depends on the text (= decoding a text)
□ languages provide us words which are themselves
stylistically marked
 affective
□ what is communicative of the feelings/attitude of the
speaker/writer
□ related to stylistic meaning
□ e.g. ‘You’re a vicious tyrant, and I hate you for it.’ =

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 depending on intonation, it can have different meanings
 reflected
□ what is communicated through association with another sense
of the same expression
□ e.g. taboo words (an intercourse = a dialogue,...; an erection
= a building,...; etc.): one of the senses/meanings becomes
prominent
□ e.g. euphemism (a comfort station = a toilet,...; physically
challenged = retarded,...; African-American = black; etc.)
 collocative
□ what is communicated through an association with words that
tend to occur in the environment of another word
□ the typical instance of how an adjective and noun are used
(pretty woman; handsome man)
□ can be found between a subject and its verbs (e.g. cow
wandered, not strolled across the field)
• these differences in meanings can be found in the contrastive analysis of a language (which
decodes the text for stylistic meaning)
• Noam Chomsky emphasised the importance of the native speaker and took the meaning back
to the focal point of cognitive sciences: ‘...because the language doesn’t exist as an abstract
structure, but it is an integral part of our brain; every single speaker of every single natural
language can make accurate judgements whether the statement is acceptable or not, and
whether meaning in any sentence is presented as acceptable to other speakers of that
language...’

• componential analysis
o approach to the analysis of the meaning of lexemes by breaking down the meaning
into components; meaning is a structure we try to analyse
o very strict attempt of analytical rigour
o began within the realm of European structuralism (1930s)
o these definitions are inadequate in traditional sense
o componential analysis is very alive today, but has changed drastically – it started
off as a theory, and then between 1930s and 1960s still remained in linguistics, but
as a methodology, not theory
o a semantic field: set of lexemes on the paradigmatic level that are grouped together
on the basis of similar meaning
o e.g. 1.
man + + + MALE
woman HUMAN ADULT - MALE
boy + - + MALE
girl HUMAN ADULT - MALE
+ HUMAN + -
+ HUMAN ADULT ADULT

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 o e.g. 2. (Pottier, 1964)
S1 S2 S3 S4 S5 S6
chaise/chair + + + + - +
fauteil/armchai + + + + + +
r
tabouret/stool - + + + - +
canapé/sofa + + - + + +
pouffe/pouf - + + + - -
 S1: with a back; S2: raised above the ground; S3: for one person; S4: to sit in/on; S5:
with arms; S6: with/made out of solid material
 introduces descriptive components, more precision, but the choice of components is
still arbitrary
o e.g. 3 (E. Nida) – see the handouts
 loosens the approach to componential analysis, retaining groups (e.g.
verbs of movement)
 alongside binary oppositions introduces numerals and descriptive terms
o e.g. 4 (Anna Wierzbicka) – see the handout
 gets a detailed contrastive analysis
 a series of descriptive components, each showing that all features are
inter-related – it’s a network, a mental picture (common to all people),
not a list
 her aim is to produce a definition of meaning that would describe the
most fully the concepts of mental images
o the selection of the components is optional – analysts decide upon them by
themselves
o if one wants a true meaning, the componential definitions must be very detailed
o the components are optional, but there is a problem of defining components
o therefore, componential analysis should only be performed with kinship terms
o componential analysis works only if it reflects close semantic relatedness

o different words may have related meanings – basic relations between related
words (basis for understanding vocabulary meaning – what happens on the
paradigmatic level)
 inclusion
□ in many instances the meaning of one word may be set to be
included within the meaning of another
□ e.g.
animal colour
dog red
poodle scarlet

 overlapping

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 □ the meanings are not identical, but they do overlap
□ they can be substituted on for the other in at least certain
contexts, without significant changes in the conceptual
context of the utterance
□ more general term can usually be substituted for another, but
not other way around
□ e.g. big-large dog

 complementation
□ meanings complementary to each other involve a number of
shaped features of meaning, but show marked contrasts and
often opposite meanings
□ e.g. big-small, high-low, buy-sell, now-then, here-there,...

 contiguity
□ these relations can be found between closely related
meanings occupying a well-defined restrictive semantic
domain in exhibiting certain well-marked contrasts
□ e.g. colours and verbs are a restricted semantic domain and
hard to describe semantically

o theory of semantic fields

 when the meaning of a word is viewed, it is easier to take notions close
to its meaning, i.e. semantically related lexemes
 Jost Trier sees the organisation on the paradigmatic level as fields
 the meaning of a lexeme is determined by the other lexemes in the
lexical field
 a set of lexemes on the paradigmatic level are grouped together on the

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 basis of similar meaning
 e.g.
boil strike
steam simmer kick punch slap

cook
boil fry broil
simmer sauté deep fry grill barbecue

 a change in reality changes the concepts, causes a change in lexical

inventory, and a change in semantic field
 cultural gap
strina, ujna, teta = aunt
 systemic gap
sg. pl. non-past past human animal plan
t
cup cups can could corpse carcass -
dress dresses may migh
t
- trousers must -
chaos -
o dichotomisation
 a set of semantically related lexemes is necessary to make binary
oppositions
 these lexemes need to be a reflection of paradigmatic level of language
 binary oppositions
□ gradable: e.g. high-low
□ non-gradable: e.g. male-female
 spatial relations
□ directional opposites: e.g. up-down, arrive-depart; come-go
(context dependent, therefore deixis)
 orthogonal relations (N, S, E, W)
 The child broke the toy. paradigmatic level

syntagmatic level

• taxonomy

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 o describing the structure of a larger set of lexemes
o borrowed from biology
o rarely more than 5 levels
o hyponymy
 the basis of taxonomic organisation
 the notion of inclusion = one lexeme is superordinate to a subordinate one =
hierarchical relationship
 superordinate is more general, subordinate is more specific
 ‘a kind of’ or ‘a type of’ relationship
□ e.g. dog (hyperonym)

Dalmatian (hyponym) Lab (hyponym) Poodle (hyponym)

co-hyponyms
□ e.g. creature

animal bird fish insect

dog elephant robin eagle cod trout ant butterfly

 ‘a part for the whole’ relationship

□ e.g. body

head neck trunk limbs

arm leg

palm finger foot toe

o taxonomies function up to a certain level – they are limited and cannot be applied to
all words
o generic terms:
 more neutral, neither too general, nor too specific
 the middle one is usually the most important for our everyday
communication: the generic level (e.g. plant > bush > rose > hybrid tea
> Peace)
 they can also cover two sexes in the same context (e.g. man-woman,
dog-bitch, cow-bull, duck-drake…)

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• metonymy
o works by contiguity rather than similarity
o arises between words which are already related to each other
o has a referential function: one entity is used to refer to another
o it is not arbitrary nor random
o always focuses on the most dominant (expressive) feature
o ‘to fish pearls’ = metonymy / ‘to fish for information’ = metaphor
o “I’m reading Kafka.”, “The White House said...”, “I’ve got a new set of wheels.”,
“We need some new blood in our organisation.”, “The ham sandwich left without
paying.”, “The Times hasn’t arrived at the press conference yet.”
o ‘producer for product’ relationship: “I’ll have a Heineken.”, “He bought a
BMW.”...
o ‘place for institution’ relationship: “Paris is introducing long skirts this season.”,
“Wall Street is in panic.”
o names for discoveries = names of inventors: Ampere, Ohm, Volt...
o one-time metonymy – occur once and never again: “The ham sandwich is waiting
for you to check.”, “The Times hasn’t arrived at the press conference yet.”

• phrasal lexemes
o very strict order of their constituent elements, e.g. to put up with someone
o unpredictable on the basis of their syntactic and semantic constituents
o syntactically they function as a compact
o if the nature of the subject is changed, the meaning of what follows is automatically
changed: e.g. to go out (= I have to go out) > cigarette went out (= no fire)

• idioms
o function as a whole (less syntactically flexible than phrasal lexemes)
o some are completely non-transparent, some have a degree of transparency
o to kick the bucket, to cook someone’s goose, to have a bee in one’s bonnet, to go
around the bend, to spill the beans, to pull someone’s leg, to be in the know...

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• metaphor
o metaphoric expressions = condense comparison; works on the principle of
similarity
o fulfils the need for the economy of language – no need to invent new terms
o A = B; A: tenor, B: vehicle (Ullmann) – their relationship is based on the similarity
of senses, which can be objective (physically recognisable) or emotive (e.g. bitter
disappointment)
o traditional view
 the basic tendency in metaphor is to translate abstract entities or
expressions into concrete terms, e.g. to throw light upon sb, to be in the
limelight, to put sth in favourable light...
 dead metaphors: metaphors in everyday language that we do not even
recognise, the meaning is not transparent at all
 the only live metaphors are found in literature, especially in poetry
o cognitive view
 Labov says that the most lively part of language are dead metaphors that
we do not notice owing to their frequent use and them becoming
conventional metaphors, but that they are still highly productive
 human thought processes are largely metaphoric – we understand one
thing in terms of another, organising our knowledge by associations on
the basis of differences and similarities
 basic conceptual metaphors
□ metaphors are not arbitrary nor random, but are
systematically organised in classes and also culturally
specific
□ they are the systems of metaphors according to which
specific linguistic terms are formed
□ they do not have to be linguistically expressed, but the
structure of metaphor is the same: A = B
□ love is war: he won her hand in marriage, he made an ally of
her mother, she pursued him relentlessly, he fled from her
advances, she fought for him...
□ love is magic: she had me hypnotised, she cast a spell over
me...
□ love is madness: I’m crazy about you...
□ people are plants: she’s in the full flower of youth, she’s a
late bloomer, that’s a budding theory, fertile imagination, to
plant the seeds of sth...
□ time is money: you’re wasting my time, the flat cost me an
hour... (not in E cultures)
 anthropomorphic expressions: transfer of body parts to inanimate
objects, e.g. hands of a clock, foot of a mountain, neck of a bottle...

• semantics and grammar

o sentence is a product of what we usually call lexical and grammatical meaning, that
is, the meaning of the constituent lexemes and grammatical structures that relate

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 one lexeme syntagmatically to another
o e.g. The dog bit the postman. / The postman bit the dog.
 the change happened in the grammatical meaning
 the meaning of the lexemes is derived from their position on the
syntagmatic level (word order)
 it does not suffice to know lexical meanings of constituent lexemes
 the key of understanding the meaning: the subjects and objects have
grammatical meaning

o word order
 provides additional information for understanding any sentence or
utterance – makes conceptual meaning more precise
 it is multifunctional; there is a nucleus of grammatical meaning
 Will you come? & Come, will you? (more harsh and severe; emphasis on
the predicate; used if angry)
o social meaning
 in certain grammatical elements in different languages grammar carries
some kind of social meaning
 e.g. social meaning expressed through ‘vi’ and ‘ti’ pronouns
 this shows that grammatical categories can carry social meaning:
pronouns of power and solidarity
 in English this is compensated by other means: titles Mr, Sir, Lady, royal
1st person (‘we’ instead of ‘I’)...
o full and functional words
 the distinction goes back to Aristotle
 full words: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs; very numerous
 functional words: articles, prepositions, conjuncts, negative particles;
depend on the sets restricted by semantic rules; not semantically empty,
as they can alter the meaning (e.g. in three days / for three days)
 in Croatian, čestice cannot be classified in either of the two above
because they are multifunctional
o utterances and sentences
 utterance
□ technical term
□ utterance meaning: belongs to spoken language; has an extra-
linguistic entity – context, and is very context-dependent
 sentence: in written communication
□ sentence meaning: belongs to written language; the context is
provided with more linguistic explanations, more text, more
paragraphs...
□ sentence, as an entity, is not simply something that we
communicate with, something that belongs to ‘la parole’ (the
concrete manifestation of language) – it also belongs to ‘la
langue’ (the abstract manifestation of language)
□ sentences have to have all elements – they have to connect
both of the above
 we speak more than we write
 it is easier to deal with grammar in full sentences – utterances are often

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 incomplete, whereas sentences are usually complete
 utterance and sentence meanings reflect the knowledge of structures
 whatever one touches in grammar, one is always dealing with meaning
in some form
 they don’t function if they have form, but not context
o deixis
 generally universal, but language-specific
 a single language has a set of symbolic structures for connecting
utterances (and sentences – different rules apply here) to the context of a
situation
 time, space, personal deictics (time and space are always interrelated in
Indo-European languages because we generally express time through
social expressions)
 the way speakers perceive space is probably one of the most important
facets of a language
 in Croatian: ovdje (speaker) – tu (hearer) – ondje; directional: ovamo–
tamo–onamo
 in urban areas the perception of space changes (due to closed spaces)

o syntax
 can be viewed as a set of rules that explain the linear ordering of the
syntagmatic level of language
 Lyons: the syntax of a language is a set of rules that account for the
distribution of word-forms throughout the sentences of a language, in
terms of permissible combinations of classes of word-forms
□ the above approach ignores the matters of meaning (e.g. The
postman bit the dog. / Milk gets rotten.)
□ the syntagmatic level is a combination of syntactic rules and
in this way formed sentences native speakers are able to
interpret and understand (e.g. John rang me up. / *John rang
up me.)
□ deviant sentences (*): semantically incorrect sentences, those
that native speakers do not find correct
□ prototypical sentences: semantically correct; more-or-less-
prototypical-principle
□ prototypical syntactic environment
♦ if there is a verb of motion (e.g. walk), the
prototypical structure is S+V(+Prep): The man
walked down the street.
♦ if one changes S, metamorphosation occurs: The
ghost walked around the house.
♦ pseudo-object: The children walked the village
streets.
♦ a less frequent usage = a less prototypical
environment
♦ the relationship between syntactic elements
(subject and object) changes the basic meaning of
the verb: change in syntax = change in the verb
□ meaning is seen as the backbone of word-classes and intricate
mechanisms found on the syntagmatic level

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  verbo-centric theories
□ L. Tesnier (1959) “Elements of Structural Syntax”: t h e v a l
e n c y t h e o r y (the verb is the focal point in the analysis,
and it dictates what can come before and after it)
□ C. Filmore “The Case for Case” (1968)
♦ aiming for mechanisms that will explain the
difference between e.g. trudge/lumber
♦ the verb, in its semantic aspect, is the key for the
rest of the sentence
♦ although syntax is still his focal point, he tries to
explain what actually happens in the deep
structure: in it there are covert categories, d e e p
c a s e s, which determine the relation of sentential
elements that appear on the surface structure
♦ the problem of deep cases is that one does not
know how many of them are there
♦ they are descriptive relations (experiencer,
instrumental, receiver...)
♦ subjects are not merely the agents, but can be in
other deep cases as well
o all major semantic and basic syntactic processes happen in the deep structure
o collocative meaning
 collocations (Lyons): grammatically connected combinations of
lexemes (semantically connected as well, but this connection is not
always transparent); usually Adj + N
 a bay horse, but a blond boy = yellow hair
 sour milk, but rotten meat = bad
 functioning of deep syntagmatic relationships

- NE BUDE U TESTU -
• cognitive semantics
o 1923: “Language”, Edward Sapir – linguistic phenomena can’t be explained
without social and psychological phenomena
o 1933: “Language”, Leonard Bloomfield – anti-psychological view of language;
dealing with phonology and morphology
o 1957: “Syntactic features”, Noam Chomsky: revolutionises linguistics – a switch
from morphology and phonetic to syntax; introduces the notions of surface and
deep structure in syntax
o 1965: “The Aspects of the Theory of Syntax”, Noam Chomsky – all semantic
procedures happen in the deep structure; on the basis of rules from the deep
structure, we get the surface structure where we get well formed sentences (he
never explained these processes)
o transformational grammar
 attempts to deal with the matters of meaning with generative framework
 produced syntactically wonderful sentences, but semantics did not
function = inability to deal with meaning in syntagmatic level – it falls
 later: realisation that meaning is anthropomorphic, not only linguistic

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 phenomena
 takes into consideration the psychological reality and pays attention to
cultural framework (and the environment)
o categories are difficult to define in terms of necessary insufficient features
o classicist approach: all members of a category are considered equal
o traditional approach: in a category, there is the most typical example of the whole
category
o prototype: the central member of a category, an ideal example of a category, a
focal point around which all other members are organised, determined by the
environment, culture, etc. (e.g. the Eskimos and the snow)
e.g.: eagle, chicken, robin, penguin
2. 3. 1. 4.
the most typical example of the category of birds
o the categorisation of colours:
 depends on a culture, on a language
 all the labels are based on typical colours
 focal colours: no in-between colours, just the main ones; they are
salient/significant
 Dani tribe in Papua-New Guinea knew only two terms for colours, those
for warm and cold colours; Eleanor Rosch taught the, the focal colours
 black, white > red > green, yellow > blue > brown > purple, pink,
orange, grey
o lexeme is viewed as a category where one member is a prototype and the others are
arranged around it, e.g. mouse (animal + object), root (plant + of a problem + in
Maths)
o prototypical word order in English: S-V-O
o prototypes are required for everyday communication because they represent the
shared knowledge we have
o minimum concepts: sufficient for everyday communication – prototypical
knowledge of a concept (e.g. potato: no need to know its anatomy)
o maximum concepts: all other things (e.g. the flower of a potato, its Latin name,
etc.)
o classification of all other notions according to the centre, core prototype
o scenes: systems of concepts that structure and form various aspects of human
experience; our knowledge of the world is organised in scenes (not a list of
information); prototypical images we have in our head, not only about things and
entities, but about events as well
o frames: the linguistics means that are available to refer to the aspects of the scene;
lexical set whose members index portions or aspects of some conceptual whole;
words interrelate so that they activate one another, forming correct sentences

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