Ling 105
Terms
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- Family Resemblances
- Family Resemblances: The idea that members of a category may be related to one another without all the members having any properties i common that define the category.
- Centrality
- The idea that some members of a category may be "better examples" of a category than others.
- Polysemy as categorization
- The idea that related meanings of words form categories and that the meanings bear family resemblances to one another
- Generativity as a prototype phenomenon
- This idea concerns categories that are defined by a generator (a particular member or subcategory) plus rules (or a general principle such as similarity). in such cases, the generator has the status of a central or "prototypical" category member.
- Membership gradience
- The idea that at least some categories have degrees of membership and no clear boundaries.
- Centrality gradience
- The idea that members (or subcategories) which are clearly within the category boundaries may still be more or less central.
- Conceptual embodiment
- The idea that the properties of certain categories are a consequence of the nature of human biological capacities and of the experience of functioning in a physical and social environment. It is contrasted with the idea that concepts exist independent of the bodily nature of any thinking beings and independent of their experience.
- Functional embodiment
- The idea that certain concepts are not merely understood intellectually; rather they are used automatically, unconsciously, and without noticeable effort as part of normal functioning. Concepts used in this way have a different and more important psychological status than those that are only thought about consciously.
- Basic level categorization
- The idea that categories are not merely organized in a hierarchy from the most general to the most specific, but are also organized so that the categories that are cognitively basic are "in the middle" of a general-to-specific hierarchy. Generalization proceeds "upward" from the basic level and specialization proceeds downward.
- Basic-level primacy
- The idea that basic-level categories are functionally and epistemologically primary with respect to the following factors: gestalt perception, image formation, motor movement, knowledge organization, ease of cognitive processing (learning, recognition, memory) and ease of linguistic expression.
- Reference-point or metonymic reasoning
- The idea that a part of a category (member or subcategory) can stand for the whole category in certain reasoning processes.