Categorization PDF

Categorization - Fundamental cognitive skill that allows you to make sense of the world and that shows up all over the place in language - Came to Cognitive Linguistics through George Lakoff’s book Women, Fire, and dangerous things What Categories Reveal about the mind G...

Categorization - Fundamental cognitive skill that allows you to make sense of the world and that shows up all over the place in language - Came to Cognitive Linguistics through George Lakoff’s book Women, Fire, and dangerous things What Categories Reveal about the mind German system of grammatical gender multisexual silverware, not so different from classifier system you find in the Australian language Dyirbal ➔ Completely arbitrary, nothing in terms of categorization going on OR Some uniting features that made the speakers of Dyribal choose that kind of category for all the elements that are classified with balan Idea of Cognitive linguists: Something may look arbitrary but there is some sort of motivation in there Aristotle: list of features that describe all elements in one category Example: ➔ If you have seen one square, you have seen them all ➔ Linguistic elements are supposed to be crisp, not fuzzy  ➔ Classical view: categories imposed on the lexical meaning of words Problems with necessary and sufficient features: Problems with inherent characteristics: we need context Not categorizing on the basis of these items, what they look like but on some sort of contextual information (food -> bowl) Problems with the idea that each category member represents its category equally well: 1. Goodness-of-example ratings  2. Speed of verification Are the following sentences true? Answer yes or no -> two buttons A robin is a bird. A duck is a fish. 3. Priming effects Furniture = prime Chair = stimulus Other elements in the category have some of the features of the prototype but not all Prototype effects in grammar: Dative alternation in English (ditransitive, prepositional dative construction) -> fruit fly of linguistics studied to death Prototypical ditransitive and prepositional dative construction -> convey similar ideas but differences In both: recipient (Mary getting the book), full noun phrase ➔ More likely to choose ditransitive construction when using a pronoun instead of name Object that is transferred -> refer to the book with pronoun “it” -> prefer prepositional dative construction takes pronominal themes Animacy: John threw the floor his keys. -> unprototypical, grammatical wrong John threw his keys to the floor. -> inanimate objects have to take prepositional dative Only possible in a metaphorical sense Definiteness: indefinite (knew thing entered into conversation: a instead of the) or definite noun phrases ➔ Ditransitive dative has an indefinite theme noun phrase prepositional dative not typical; second example possible because of recipient