Prototype theory makes a crucial distinction between central and peripheral sense of words. Geeraerts explores the implications of this model for a theory of semantic change, in the first full-scale treatment of the impact of the most recent developments in lexicological theory on the study of meaning change. He identifies structural features of the development of word meanings which follow from a prototype-theoretical model of semantic structure, and incorporates these diachronic prototypicality effects into a theory of meaning change.
Lexical diversity, the amount of lexical variation shown by a particular concept, varies between concepts. For the concept drunk, for instance, nearly 3000 English expressions exist, including blitzed, intoxicated, and hammered. For the concept sober, however, a significantly smaller number of lexical items is available, like sober or abstinent. While earlier variation studies have revealed that meaning-related concept characteristics correlate with the amount of lexical variation, these studies were limited in scope, being restricted to one semantic field and to one (...) dialect area, that of the Limburgish dialects of Dutch. In this paper, we investigate whether the impact of concept characteristics, viz. vagueness, lack of salience and proneness to affect, is manifest in a similar way in other dialects and other semantic fields. In particular, by extending the scope of the earlier studies to other carefully selected semantic fields, we investigate the generalizability of the impact of concept characteristics to the lexicon as a whole. The quantitative approach that we employ to measure concept characteristics and lexical diversity methodologically advances the study of linguistic variation. Theoretically, this paper contributes to the further development of Cognitive Sociolinguistics by showcasing how meaning can be a source of lexical diversity. (shrink)
It is often said that prototypically structured concepts are a counterexample with regard to the classical view of categorization, viz. that categories always have a single definition in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. However, such statements about the nature of prototypicality do not take into account the distinction between vagueness and ambiguity. In particular, they are never accompanied by a specification of the criteria according to which the allegedly prototypical concepts are indeed a single semantic category. An exploration of (...) the distinction between analytic and introspective criteria for ambiguity shows that prototypicality is part of a larger class of phenomena exhibiting discrepancies between both approaches. Specifically, prototypicality and autohyponymy together make clear that analyticdistinctness of meaningisneithera necessary nor a sufficient condition for introspectively recognized ambiguity, such as it determines the truth conditions of utterances. (shrink)
