Syntax & Semantics Circle, University of California, Berkeley

In the early 1970s psychologists like Eleanor Rosch demonstrated that categories are organised around prototypes, which are the most representative members of a category, and that the closer one gets to the periphery of the category, the less typical the members are. Using experimental methods, Rosch (1975) showed, for example, that the robin is judged as the most representative bird or that the elevator is considered a very atypical example of the category of vehicles. It did not take long until linguists saw the relevance of the concept of prototypicality to their own field, applying it to the meanings of words (see e.g. Fillmore [1977] on the word "bachelor") or to more abstract levels of linguistic representation (e.g. Hopper & Thompson's [1980] study of transitivity). Most of the time, however, the prototypes in linguistics are established on the basis of intuition, with no empirical evidence to prove their reality.

In this talk, I present results of a study testing the linguistic and cognitive reality of the prototypes of high-frequency verbs. Because prototypes are particularly common in cognitive linguistics, especially in the form of lexical (or radial) networks, the prototypes to be tested were taken from the (essentially intuition-based) cognitive literature, e.g. Norvig & Lakoff (1987) for take and Newman (2005) for give. The linguistic reality of these prototypes was tested by means of corpus data, which makes it possible to determine the most frequent sense of a word — the assumption being, in Schmid's (2000: 39) words, that "frequency in text instantiates entrenchment in the cognitive system". The cognitive reality of the prototypes was tested by means of experimental data (online sentence production experiments and typicality judgments) aimed at identifying the cognitively most salient senses of the verbs under study.

The comparison of the different tests reveals that the most frequent sense as attested in corpus data does not necessarily coincide with the most salient sense as evidenced by experiments. Moreover, it appears that the linguistic and cognitive tests do not always confirm the reality of the prototypes found in the literature. Possible explanations will be offered to account for the divergences observed, and the implications for Foreign Language Teaching will be briefly discussed.

References
Fillmore, C.J. 1977. Scenes-and-frames semantics. In A. Zampolli, ed., Linguistic Structures Processing. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company, 55-81.
Hopper, P.J. and S.A. Thompson. 1980. Transitivity in grammar and discourse. Language 56, 251-299.
Newman, J. 2005. Three-place predicates: A cognitive-linguistic perspective. Language Sciences 27, 145-163.
Norvig, P. and G. Lakoff. 1987. Taking: A study in lexical network theory. In J. Aske, N. Beery, L. Michaelis and H. Filip, eds, Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, February 14-16, 1987. General Session and Parasession on Grammar and Cognition. Berkeley: BLS, 195-206.
Rosch, E. 1975. Cognitive representations of semantic categories. Journal of Experimental Psychology, General 104, 192-233.
Schmid, H.-J. 2000. English Abstract Nouns as Conceptual Shells: From Corpus to Cognition. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.