cognitive linguistics lecture 1精品分析.doc

Lecture One Prototypes, Categories and Categorization 1.1 Importance of categorization (Lakoff 1987:5-11): “There is nothing more basic than categorization to our thought, perception, action, and speech.” Every time we see something as a kind of thing, we are categorizing. Whenever we reason about kinds of things, we are employing categories. Any time we either produce or understand any utterance of any reasonable length, we are employing categories: categories of speech sounds, of words, of phrases and clauses, as well as conceptual categories. The above discussion involves two major types of categorization, the categorization of natural things and that of language (Taylor 2001) --- the latter can be referred to as metacategorization. “Without the ability to categorize, we could not function at all, either in the physical world or in our social and intellectual lives. An understanding of how we categorize is central to any understanding of how we think and how we function, and therefore central to an understanding of what make us human.” From the time of Aristotle to the later work of Wittengenstein, categories were assumed to be abstract containers, with things either inside or outside the category. Things were assumed to be in the same category if and only if they had certain properties in common. And the properties they had in common were taken as defining the category. This classical theory became part of the background assumptions taken for granted in most scholarly disciplines over the centuries. Within cognitive psychology, categorization has become a major field of study, thanks to the pioneering work of the psychologist Eleanor Rosch, who made categorization an issue. Rosch observed that studies demonstrated that categories, in general, have best examples (called “prototypes”) and that all of the specifically human capacities do play a role in categorization. Prototype theory is changing our idea of the most fundamental of human capacities --- the capac