Prototypicality in language: How to measure it?
(2005) Psycholinguistics in Flanders 2005 — Location: Leuven (30.May.2005)
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- The notion of prototypicality, after originating in the field of psychology, has been enthusiastically adopted by linguists to describe facts of language. And not without reason, for this notion makes it possible to account for the variability and fuzziness of language as established, most notably, by corpus-based studies. Its transfer from psychology to linguistics, however, is far from being obvious (see also Tsohatzidis 1990: 8). On the one hand, the methodology developed by psychologists to test the prototypicality of concrete categories such as birds or furniture is difficult to apply to abstract levels of linguistic representations – which probably explains why many of the descriptions of prototypes found in the literature (more particularly the cognitive literature) have no empirical foundation and seem to rely on the linguist’s own intuition. On the other hand (and probably as a consequence), the term ‘prototype’ has become a ‘catch-all notion’ (Wierzbicka 1985: 343; see also Geeraerts 1989: 606) and linguists do not always make it clear what definition they have in mind. The aim of the study presented here is to come to an empirically grounded description of the prototype of the highly polysemous verbs give and take, using various measures. I will present the results of an elicitation experiment, where respondents were asked to give the first sentence they could think of for each verb, and will compare them with corpus counts. I will also evoke other methods that might be used to measure prototypicality (including comprehension tests and tests aimed at cross-linguistic comparison), as well as some of the problems posed by such methods. The nature of prototypicality will be discussed in the light of the seemingly disparate results produced by the different methods.
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Gilquin, G. (2005). Prototypicality in language: How to measure it? Psycholinguistics in Flanders 2005, Leuven. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/225336