From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Re: Prototypes [was Re: typology of Esperanto]
Organization: SPSS Inc.
Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1992 17:38:15 GMT

In article <1992Aug26.002755.5143@athena.mit.edu> pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky) writes:
>I have looked at Lakoff's recent book, though not with great care, and I
>have heard Lakoff give a long (three-hour) talk on the book.  One
>question that is never addressed, at least not by him, is why we should
>think that our sense that some avians are "better examples" of birds and
>others worse is a fact about the nature of categories instead of a fact
>about our ability to decide what belongs in what category.  

I'd like to know more about what you mean here.  Prototype effects have 
been well demonstrated; they have to be explained somehow.  What's your
alternative to Lakoff's model?  From your statement I presume you propose
to retain the traditional view of categories (= sets of objects sharing
certain properties), but supplement it with an account of how human beings 
assign objects to categories.  

I think Lakoff would argue 1) that the traditional view just doesn't work
with certain categories: not all categories can be made to share a set
of minimal features; 2) that categories found in language do not necessarily
correspond to "natural kinds" in the world, but depend on facts of human
cognition or culture; 3) that prototype theory goes well beyond the task of
assigning objects to categories: that we use prototypes, ideal examples,
or stereotypes to make judgments, to evaluate probabilities, to make
comparisons, to make plans; 4) that certain categories do not merely exhibit
prototype effects, but are actually defined using prototypes.

As an example of (1), he discusses the gender system of Dyirbal.  The
_balan_ category of Dyirbal is the source of the "Women, Fire, and Dangerous
Things" of the book's title.  A fuller enumeration of its contents would
be: women, bandicoots, dogs, platypus, echidna, some snakes and fishes,
most but not all birds, fireflies, scorpions, crickets, things connected 
with water or fire, the sun and stars, shields, some spears, some trees.

I challenge anyone to come up with a set of minimal properties which
are common to this motley crew and to nothing else.  However, the grouping
is rather neatly explained by Lakoff's theory (or, more precisely, that of
R.M.W. Dixon, whose analysis Lakoff presents).  The prototypical _balan_
members are human females; everything else achieves its membership by
certain conventional links to women.  For instance, the sun is in Dyirbal
mythology the wife of the moon, and so is assigned "feminine" gender.  
Fire gets in the same category by being linked to the sun; matches and pipes
are _balan_ through their link with fire.  Most birds are considered to
be the spirits of dead women, and so birds are _balan_ too.  And so on.

An example of (2), categories that depend on cognition, is Berlin and Kay's
famous work on colors.  What's out there in the world is a spectrum of
colors, without landmarks.  But the nature of our vision gives us a 
relatively small set of prototypical colors.

>Certainly there are marvellously interesting observations, for example
>about the ubiquity and systematicity of metaphor, but the larger edifice
>with prototypes and all looks very dubious to me.  One reason is
>Lakoff's conclusion that traditional linguistics is barking up the wrong
>tree, since it is based on categories.  

Methinks Lakoff may be attempting too much.  Prototype theory can be very
fruitfully applied to questions of semantics-- what a "bachelor" is, what
a "bird" is.  Applying it to syntactic questions-- what a "noun" is, etc.--
may be overachieving.