It’s around here: Residential history and the meaning of ‘Midwest’

It’s around here: Residential history and the meaning of ‘Midwest’ Vsevolod Kapatsinski (vkapatsi@uoregon.edu) Department of Linguistics, 1290 University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403 USA Richard Janda (rjanda@indiana.edu) Department of Linguistics, Indiana University Bloomington, IN 47401 USA Abstract Even speakers of American English who think they grew up in the Midwest do not agree on its boundaries. So what determines the meaning of 'Midwest' to a given speaker? We argue that the meaning of a geographical term like ‘Midwest’ is based in part on one's experience with locations that one knows to be part of the region. This exemplar-based knowledge causes the perceived location of the Midwest to shift depending on where in the Midwest a respondent has lived and to remain fixed in space over time despite changes in features of exemplar locations. Nonetheless, regression analyses suggest that exemplar knowledge, when available, coexists with more abstract definitional knowledge. We believe that empirical studies of meanings of geographical terms can shed light on the nature of human semantic categories and the role of specific exemplars in semantic representation. Keywords: Semantics, cognitive maps, exemplar models, vernacular regions, perceptual geography. Introduction Every American English speaker has heard of the Midwest. It is visited by politicians, discussed by pundits and weather forecasters, and even appears commonly in cognitive science articles on “students at a Midwestern university”. Yet, the location of the region is surprisingly elusive. The question we ask is what determines the location of the Midwest for a particular speaker. Why does the meaning of 'Midwest' vary across speakers and what factors account for this variation? The classical approach to lexical semantics, dating back to Aristotle, has maintained that word meanings can be defined using necessary and sufficient conditions. According to this view, semantic categories have distinct boundaries. This, at the time dominant, view of semantics was explicitly challenged in the seventies by several linguists and psychologists, including Labov (1973), McCloskey & Glucksberg (1978), and Rosch (1973), who showed that category boundaries of natural concepts can be fuzzy. For instance, Labov (1973) found that there is no agreed-upon ratio of width to height at which cups become mugs. McCloskey & Glucksberg (1978) demonstrated that uncertainty about category boundaries can also hold within speakers. These studies have been extremely influential in initiating a shift from feature-based descriptions of semantic categories to exemplar, prototype, and connectionist models (see Murphy 2002, Taylor 1995 for reviews). In recent work, it has become apparent that categories vary in the fuzziness of their boundaries depending, in particular, on whether the category consists of artifacts or organisms (Diesendruck & Gelman 1999, Estes 2003). We believe that the range of lexical meanings under discussion in the psychological and linguistic literatures has been unduly restricted. Differences between categories of organisms and categories of artifacts are interesting but difficult to explain because organisms differ from artifacts in a myriad ways. An interesting additional class of concepts to consider is the class of locations/regions, such as “the Midwest”, or “the neighborhood”. Categories of locations vary greatly in how they are acquired and defined, with some having clear boundaries (e.g., the United States), and others having very fuzzy ones (e.g., the Midwest). Thus, boundary fuzziness is not a property of domains (pace Diesendruck & Gelman 1999 and Estes 2003) but rather a property of individual concepts, likely due to how these concepts are acquired and how much hinges on getting the boundary right. If a category is acquired completely implicitly through the accumulation of exemplars, its boundaries are likely to be fuzzy, whereas a category that is learned by memorizing a definition can have clear boundaries (as long as the defining attributes of the category are easily identifiable, cf. Armstrong et al. 1983). Furthermore, multiple sources of knowledge can combine, resulting in a concept that is neither completely exemplar-based nor completely feature- based. We argue that the meaning of “Midwest” for a given listener can be influenced by his/her experience with specific exemplar Midwestern locations, the literal interpretation of the word, and the official definition of the region. Geographical terms offer distinctive advantages in exploring the relationship between experience and concept formation because people are aware of the locations they have lived in and can easily describe them (unlike the specific artifacts or organisms they have seen). While never discussed in linguistics or psychology, the perceived locations of geographical regions have been studied by cultural geographers, starting with Brownell (1960). Jordan (1978: 293) defines perceptual or vernacular regions as “those perceived to exist by their inhabitants and other members of the population at large… Such regions are