Combining Categories
All around us, we find instances where objects like tall man or small elephant combine one or more categories. This was a problem for extensional semantics, where the semantics of a word such as red is to be defined as the set of objects having this property. Clearly, this does not apply so well to modifiers such as small; a small mouse is very different from a small elephant.
These combinations pose a lesser problem in terms of prototype theory. In situations involving adjectives (e.g. tall), one encounters the question of whether or not the prototype of is a 6 feet tall man, or a 400 feet skyscraper . The solution emerges by contextualizing the notion of prototype in terms of the object being modified. This extends even more radically in compounds such as red wine or red hair which are hardly red in the prototypical sense, but the red indicates merely a shift from the prototypical colour of wine or hair respectively. This corresponds to de Saussure's notion of concepts as purely differential: "non pas positivement par leur contenu, mais negativement par leurs rapports avec les autres termes du systeme" .
Other problems remain - e.g. in determining which of the constituent categories will contribute which feature? In the example of a "pet bird", pet provides the habitat of the compound (cage rather than the wild), whereas bird provides the skin type (feathers rather than fur).
Read more about this topic: Prototype Theory
Famous quotes containing the words combining and/or categories:
“The wilderness experiences a suddent rise of all her streams and lakes. She feels ten thousand vermin gnawing at the base of her noblest trees. Many combining drag them off, jarring over the roots of the survivors, and tumble them into the nearest stream, till, the fairest having fallen, they scamper off to ransack some new wilderness, and all is still again.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Of course I’m a black writer.... I’m not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren’t marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call “literature” is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hassidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.”
—Toni Morrison (b. 1931)