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The classical theory

المؤلف:  Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green

المصدر:  Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction

الجزء والصفحة:  C8-P251

2025-12-25

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The classical theory

Before presenting Rosch’s findings concerning categorisation, it is important to set her research in some historical context. The ‘classical theory’ of categorisation was the prevalent model since the time of Aristotle and holds that conceptual and linguistic categories have definitional structure. This means that an entity represents a category member by virtue of fulfilling a set of necessary and (jointly) sufficient conditions for category membership. These conditions are called ‘necessary and sufficient’ because they are individually necessary but only collectively sufficient to define a category. Traditionally, the conditions were thought to be sensory or perceptual in nature. To illustrate, consider once more the familiar lexical concept BACHELOR. For an entity to belong to this category, it must adhere to the following conditions: ‘is not married’; ‘is male’; ‘is an adult’. Each of these conditions is necessary for defining the category, but none of them is individually sufficient because ‘is not marrried’ could equally hold for SPINSTER, while ‘is male’ could equally hold for HUSBAND, and so on. In theories of linguistic meaning, necessary and sufficient conditions have taken the form of semantic primitives or componential features, an idea that we have mentioned in previous chapters (recall our discussion of semantic universals in Chapter 3 and our discussion of the dictionary view of linguistic meaning in Chapter 7). As we have seen, the idea of semantic primitives has been influential in semantic theories that adopt the formal ‘mentalist’ view proposed by Chomsky, which is primarily concerned with modelling an innate and specialised system of linguistic knowledge. This is because, in principle at least, semantic primitives suggest the possibility of a set of universal semantic features that can be combined and recombined in order to give rise to an infinite number of complex units (word meanings). This approach is reminiscent of the characterisation of human speech sounds in phonetics and phonology,where a bundle of articulatory features makes up each speech sound. It is also reminiscent of the characterisation of sentence structure in terms of strings of words that combine to make phrases, which then combine to make sentences. In other words, the influence of the semantic decomposition approach reflects the influence of structural approaches to sound and grammar upon the development of theories of word meaning. This kind of approach is attractive for a formal theory because it enables the formulation of precise statements which are crucial to the workings of the ‘algorithmic’ or ‘computational’ model favoured by these approaches. For example, Katz (1972) argued that the English noun chair names a category that can be decomposed into the set of semantic features or markers shown in Table 8.1.

However, while many (usually formal) linguists would argue that ‘decompositional’ approaches have worked rather well for modelling the structural aspects of language such as phonology or syntax, many linguists (both formal and cognitive) also recognise that the classical decompositional theory of word meaning suffers from a number of problems. We discuss here three of the most serious problems with this approach.