UNGERER FRIEDRICH & HANS JORG SCHMID (2006)

PROTOTYPES AND CATEGORIES

Categorization: mental process of classification. Its product are the cognitive categories (e.g. the colour categories RED, YELLOW, GREEN, BLUE, etc.). Different languages carve up reality in totally different ways (Whorf). Category membership is not a yes-or-no distinction. Rather it involves different degrees of typicality, as is supported by goodness-of-example ratings, recognition, matching and learning tasks. Categories are formed around prototypes, which function as cognitive reference points. As far as the boundaries of categories are concerned, at some unspecified point or area beyond their periphery the categories somehow fade into nowhere. The boundaries of cognitive categories are fuzzy, i.e. neighbouring categories are not separated by rigid boundaries, but merge into each other. All types of concrete entities and natural phenomena are conceptually organized in terms of prototype categories, whose boundaries do not seem to be clear-cut, but fuzzy. There is no one-to-one relation between categories (or concepts) and words. In fact it is quite normal that one word denotes several categories, or in conventional linguistic terminology, that words are polysemous. A category is defined by a limited set of necessary and sufficient conditions. These conditions are conceived as clear-cut, discrete features (essential features), which can be either present or absent. Family resemblances: a network of overlapping similarities. Each item has at least one, and probably several, elements in common with one or more other items, but no, or few, elements are common to all items. Prototypical members of cognitive categories have the largest number of attributes in common with other members of the category and the smallest number of attributes which also occur with members of neighbouring categories. This means that in terms of attributes, prototypical members are maximally distinct from the prototypical members of other categories. Bad examples (or marginal category members) share only a small number of attributes with other members of their category, but have several attributes which belong to other categories as well, which is, of course, just another way of saying that category boundaries are fuzzy.

Deviant cases: category members whose attributes do not comply with the expected norm. The prototypes of cognitive categories are not fixed, but may change when a particular context is introduced, and the same is true for category boundaries. The whole internal structure of a category seems to depend on the context and, in a wider sense, on our social and cultural knowledge, which is thought to be organized in cognitive and cultural models. The context not only determines the choice of the category prototype, but that it also leads to an adjustment of the position of other category members. For cognitive linguistics, the notion of context should be considered a mental phenomenon; and situation refers to some state of affairs in the real world. AVOID CONTEXT USE COGNITIVE MODEL. Cognitive model: all the stored cognitive representations that belong to a certain field. Cognitive models are not isolated cognitive entities, but interrelated. Cognitive categories are not just dependent on the immediate context in which they are embedded, but also on this whole bundle of contexts that are associated with it. Cognitive representation of some aspect of reality in which we have some experience. Cognitive models represent a cognitive, basically psychological, view of the stored knowledge about a certain field. Since psychological states are always private and individual experiences, descriptions of such cognitive models necessarily involve a considerable degree of idealization. In other words, descriptions of cognitive models are based on the assumption that many people have roughly the same basic knowledge about things. Cognitive models are of course not universal, but depend on the culture in which a person grows up and lives. The culture provides background for all the situations that we have to experience in order to be able to form a cognitive model. So, cognitive models for particular domains ultimately depend on socalled cultural models. In reverse, cultural models can be seen as cognitive models that are shared by people belonging to a social group or subgroup.
Cognitive models are coherent bodies of knowledge of belief and assumptions about a particular field or domain of human experience, necessary to organize concepts. (CONCEPT GIVEN IN CLASS)