How to Understand Prototype Semantics

Thirty years ago, a prototype approach to meaning was suggested by Eleanor Rosch. Rosch conducted psycholinguistic research on the internal structure of categories and the influence of categories on word meaning. This research has proven to be very important to the field of semantics. Here's how to understand prototype semantics.

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Instructions

1. Know why prototype semantics is important. People think in categories and categories underlie much of our vocabulary and much of our reasoning.

2. Know why people think in categories. People think in categories to get the most information about an object with the least cognitive effort. For example, if someone mentions a robin, you know a robin is a bird and a bird has feathers, flies, builds nests and so on.

3. Know the features of prototypicality. Members of a category do not always share the same amount of features; the structure of categories takes the form of a set of clustered and overlapping meaning; categories exhibit degrees of membership; categories have fuzzy boundaries.

4. Know how objects are assigned to categories. Objects are assigned to categories by comparing an object to a persons view of the best exemplar associated with the category. For example, if your prototypical bird is a robin, you would assign additional objects to the category of bird based on their similarity to a robin. Additionally, people measure similarities when determining category membership by appearance and by degree of variation and/or influence of use.