Object category

4 Key excerpts on "Object category"

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  The Linguistic Worldview

  Ethnolinguistics, Cognition, and Culture

  • Adam Glaz, David Danaher, Przemyslaw Lozowski(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Open Poland

    (Publisher)

  For example, the definition of morphological categories makes no reference to the fact that they carry meanings rather than being semantically empty. Word-formational categories fall outside morphological categories thus understood, although new meanings are expressed by word-formational morphemes . Lexical categories , in turn, have been defined as if they had no typical morphological or syntactic exponents. This isolationist method of identifying and defining categories within a single language subsystem, representative of Polish linguistics of the latter half of the twentieth century, does not reflect the nature of language and the way that it operates. Above all, it seems to overlook the fact that language is a human product whose structure and functioning are inextricable from its speakers. As language creator and user, the human speaker does receive due attention in contemporary anthropological and cognitive linguistics, which assumes that categorization (i.e. seeing similarity in diversity) is an aspect of general human cognitive capacity and as such cannot be dissociated from natural language. In the process of cognizing the world, humans create concepts that facilitate an ordering of the reality being experienced. Some of these concepts find their way to language as the basis for divers linguistic categories (Dirven & Verspoor, 2004; Grzegorczykowa & Szymanek , 2001). A major philosophical problem arises at this juncture: do concepts express real-world properties or do they reflect arbitrary linguistic convention? Grzegorczykowa (1996) reconciles the two extreme positions of objectivism and subjectivism by proposing that in the linguistically fragmented objective world, there are phenomena dependent on language to various degrees.

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  Cognitive Linguistics in the Redwoods

  The Expansion of a New Paradigm in Linguistics

  • Eugene H. Casad(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  From cognitive psychology to cognitive linguistics and back again: The study of category structure Barbara C. Malt 1. Introduction The study of concepts and classification in psychology has long been intertwined with the study of word meaning in linguistics, and both fields have drawn from, and contributed to, consideration of these same issues in anthropology and philosophy. To take just one example of this mutual influence, the psychologist Rosch's early studies of the mental representation of categories (e.g., 1973; Rosch & Mervis 1975; Rosch, Mervis, Gray, Johnson, & Boyes-Braem 1976) were heavily influenced by previous anthropological work by Berlin and his col-leagues (e.g., Berlin & Kay 1969; Berlin, Breedlove, & Raven 1974), by philosophical writings by Wittgenstein (1953), and by linguistic analyses provided by Lakoff (1972). The work of Berlin et al. was it-self inspired in part by linguistic hypotheses advanced by Sapir (1949) and by Whorf (1956), while the outcomes of Rosch's studies have in turn been influential in subsequent work in linguistics (e.g., Lakoff 1987; Taylor 1989). Thus this general area of investigation has been one of the most truly interdisciplinary ventures in the study of mind and language. The recent rise of an orientation within linguistics known as cogni-tive linguistics would seem to suggest an even closer alignment be-tween the work of linguists and cognitive psychologists interested in concepts and word meanings. In fact, however, the trend in psycholog-ical theorizing about these topics has been in a rather different direc-tion from the trend within cognitive linguistics. Below, I will briefly describe recent suggestions from psychology about the nature of con-cepts, and I will discuss the motivation behind these suggestions. 148 Barbara C. Malt These will be contrasted with the view pursued by cognitive linguists in describing word meaning.

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  Concise Encyclopedia of Semantics

  • Keith Allan(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Elsevier Science

    (Publisher)

  To this extent, the study of word meanings is the study of the categories that these words denote. And it is not only words that can be said to designate categories. It can be argued that syntactic configurations, for example, those asso-ciated with intransitive, transitive, and ditransitive constructions, designate distinct categorizations of events and their participants. 76 Cognitive Semantics What is the basis for categorization? Intuitively, we might want to say that things get placed in the same category because of their similarity. Similarity, how-ever, is a slippery notion. One approach would be to define similarity in terms of the sharing of some com-mon feature(s) or attribute(s). Similarity, then, would reduce to a matter of partial identity. Feature-based theories of categorization often require that all mem-bers of a category share all the relevant features. A corollary of this approach is that categories are well-defined, that is, it is a clear-cut matter whether a given entity does, or does not, belong in the catego-ry. It also follows that all members have equal status within the category. There are a number of problems associated with this approach. One is that the categories designated by linguistic expressions may exhibit a prototype structure. Some members of the category might be more representative than others, while the boundary of the category may not be clearly defined. In a well-known passage, though without introducing the prototype concept, Wittgenstein (1953: x 66) drew attention to categorization by family resemblance. Imagine a family photograph. Some members of the family might have the family nose, others might have the family chin, others might have the family buck teeth. No member of the family need exhibit all the family traits, yet each exhibits at least one; moreover, some members might exhibit different traits from others.

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  Advances in Visual Semiotics

  The Semiotic Web 1992-93

  • (Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Whether or not members of the Cognitive linguistics and prototypes 433 category satisfy this characteristic remains indeterminate. A graphic representation does not offer the possibility of omitting a feature. If prototypes cannot be drawn, the lexicologist must go back to prepositional representations which will have the structure of a family resemblance. Once again, it appears that family resemblances belong to a level of representation different from the hypothetical mental images. Linguistic Categories In the preceding section, I have been describing perceptual categories (colors, natu-ral species, and artefacts) independently of their associated names. Thus, as far as possible, I have been concerned with the category of dogs rather than with the linguistic category consisting of the uses of the word dog. According to the most radical version of structuralism, this attempt is doomed to failure. Indeed, struc-turalists would say that the category of dogs only exists through the arbitrary divi-sion of reality determined by the choice of the word dog. According to cognitive linguistics, in contrast, the existence in the world of the category of dogs is partially independent of its name. This is not to say that they are completely sepa-rable. Even though Rosch's intentions were to study human categorization of natural species and not of the associated word, most of her experiments were conducted through language, be it written or spoken. However, two differences between perceptual categories and linguistic categories are beyond question. First, the domain of linguistic categories is wider than the domain of perceptual cate-gories. Second, the representation of the world by language is nominal while its representation in perceptual categories is ordinal. These two issues will be addressed in turn in this section. I will conclude this chapter with a comparison between the linguistic sign and the visual sign as it is described by Groupe μ (1992).

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