Prototype Theory
The "prototype theory" was proposed by Rosch (1978), who suggested that when people categorize objects they match them against "the prototype", i.e. an "ideal exemplar", which contains the most representative features inside the category. Objects that do not share all the characteristics of the prototype are still members of the category but not prototypical ones. She argued that prototypes represent a "basic level of categorization", e.g. "chair", as opposed to a "superordinate", e.g. "furniture" and a "subordinate" level, e.g. "kitchen chair". The prototype theory has been particularly fruitful in providing several researchers with a convenient explanation of some phenomena in studies of vocabulary acquisition and teaching, mental lexicon, as well as in studies of cognitive linguistics and linguistic data. Rosch's concept of prototype served Griffiths (1986) to illustrate "the nature of the mental representations children have for their nominals" (p. 295). He focuses on dissimilarities between the language systems of a child and an adult, paying special attention to the so-called "overextension", i.e. covering many meanings with one word only. It is exemplified by presenting the situations in which a little girl, R., applied
Another implication the idea of prototypes has for linguistics is noted by Widdowson (1996). While discussing the sources of linguistic data, the author admits that the claims of "corpus linguistics", i.e. data drawn from observation of "actually occurring language" (p. 73), could be doubtful. To exemplify this stand, Widdowson points to the organization of our knowledge in terms of prototypes. When users of English were asked to give instances of prototypical sentences, the most common answer was "subject - verb - object" construction. However, it does not occur very frequently in actual usage, as we tend to use more complicated sentences. Thus, prototypes "provide a different kind of data which are evidence of competence which is not directly projected into performance" (p. 74) In the view of Aitchison (1994) prototype theory is of value in the study of "mental lexicon", i.e. "human word store". The problem she faces is "how people are able to cope with word meaning when it is so fuzzy and fluid" (p. 63). The best solution is that we have a prototypical exemplar of a word in our minds and any new items are set against it, although it does not have to be an ideal match. This viewpoint, according to Aitchison, offers also a reasonable explanation for how we cope with new or untypical instances of a category. By providing various examples, the author extends the notion of prototype beyond nouns, to verbs and adjectives. For example, a prototypical use of "climb" involves upward movement and
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