Prototype Theory: Individual and Collective Aspects
I shall begin with the prototype theory, as categorisation is an important feature of the human conceptual system. The focus of this chapter will be to outline briefly the findings of Eleonor Rosch, which had a great impact on the development of cognitive linguistics.
Unlike the traditional view, the world out there is not neatly organised in categories that have clearly defined boundaries. Many categories have fuzzy boundaries
and not all members of a category can be considered “good” members. The “goodness”
of example can be defined in terms of prototypicality. Prototypicality characterises the best or most typical examples, i.e. the centre of the category. For example, the best example of a table would be a table with four legs, whereas tables with one or three legs would not be typical examples. The prototype theory is associated with the figure of Eleonor Rosch and her colleagues and originated in the mid-1970s.
An important question for the present dissertation concerns the universality of prototypes. It has been shown that people belonging to different cultures do not categorise in the same way, although they are all endowed with the same cognitive apparatus. According to Rosch (and colleagues), categorisation does not entirely rely on our perceptory sense, but also on the environment we inhabit:
Basic objects for an individual, subculture, or culture must result from an interaction between the potential structure provided by the world and the particular emphases and state of knowledge of the people who are categorizing. However, the environment places constraints on categorization. (Rosch et al. 1976:430)
Thus, the environment determines categorisation to a certain extent. The categories are further determined by our interaction with the environment. Consider, for example, the category of size; concepts such as small/ large are acquired on the basis of the size of the objects in our environment with which we come into contact, but also on the basis of
for an adult. Therefore, one can assert that concepts are formed as a result of physical motion within the environment and that these concepts are relative to features of our body. A child learns the categories small / large on the basis of the other’s conceptualisation of size, i.e. on the basis of their parents’ evaluation of size: “That is
too big for you”. If this is true about common objects found in our immediate environment, one is tempted to conclude that the same should also apply to evaluations on the size of any entity, including the size of a city or a town. Thus, it can be concluded that the category SIZE results from a combination of individual and collective
experience of space. The same assumptions can be further applied to other categories as well. Obviously, categories will differ from individual to individual, but also from culture to culture or from community to community.
In other words, prototypes are activated within a particular context17
and are thus not to be seen as constant and exemplary member of a category. Even if we can talk of a general category of a “house”, the prototype is an instantiation in context and is liable to take different forms in different contexts.18
For the sake of exemplification, consider the
occurrence of “house(s)” in the four sentences below19
:
1. We decided to buy a house from the company “Schwabenhaus” and we aren’t sorry: the components were assembled within a few weeks, which saved us a lot of hassle.
2. Last week we visited the Open-air Museum on Lake Constance and we were impressed by the houses built over the water.
3. One of my colleagues from the US said he literally loves his new house
because he can own property and still stay flexible as his house can be easily relocated.
4. The children came back after a long day in the forest and said excitedly that they built a beautiful house.
17
Context is to be understood here as inclusive of the human, mental component and instantiated at a particular time and space. An appropriate definition of context as used in the present paper is provided by Langacker (2001:144) as part of “current discourse space”(shortly, CDS): “The CDS is defined as the mental space comprising those elements and relations construed as being shared by the speaker and hearer as a basis for communication at a given moment in the flow of discourse.”
18
See Ungerer & Schmid (2006: 45-58). 19
The examples have been created in analogy to the “dog” illustration in Ungerer & Schmid (2006: 45- 46).
The recipient of the message in the examples above will have generated a different image of what is referred to by the word house in each sentence. In example (1), the most likely mental representation is the one of a prefabricated house. If the reader/hearer lives in Germany, additional information will be likely triggered by the
name “Schwabenhaus”; in any case, it is highly unlikely that the image of a “bricks and mortar” house would be activated. In the historical context of example (2) and prompted
by the adverbial phrase “over the water”, the image of a stilt house will probably be
retrieved from the reader’s mental lexicon. The adverb “probably” is not used here as a hedge, but is supposed to convey the meaning that the prototype is versatile even in the same co-text, i.e. if individual readers’ general knowledge about a concept differs, the mental image triggered will occasionally differ as well. Thus, in example (2), a putative reader could retrieve the image of a houseboat or float house. In a similar manner, the reader has probably imagined a mobile house in example (3) and depending on individual semantic memory, the mobile house could be a house on wheels or a house on a raft. Finally, in the example (4) the image of a tree house would probably come first to mind. It follows that what comes first20 to mind is the most typical member of a category as activated by a particular context. Thus, the prototype generated in context (e.g. mobile house) could differ from the context-free21
prototype of a house (e.g. most likely, a two-storey house, made of bricks and mortar).22
As Ungerer & Schmid indicate (2006: 46-47), shifting prototypes in context may impact on the non-contextualized category itself. The mechanism of category alterations could be described as follows: if we assume that a two-storey house, made of bricks and mortar, is a prototypical house based on a typicality test, then a prefabricated house or a mobile house can be automatically ranked as less prototypical members, for example, due to the material used as well as the method of construction. Yet, in none of the
20
To put it simply, the meaning of “proto-“ for the context-dependent prototype would be “first” from a temporal perspective while “proto-“ would mean “first” from a typicality perspective for the context-free prototype.
21
It is important to keep in mind that a literally context-free prototype does not exist. Whenever a speaker is requested to retrieve a typical exemplar for a category from his semantic memory, the typical exemplar will be context-tainted as category members are stored in dependency of a context in the memory.
22
examples above can the house made of bricks and mortar be selected as a prototype and thus the context-dependent category receives a structure that differs from the one of the de-contextualized category. As the selection of the context-dependent prototype is cued by attributes that are essential features of that particular exemplar, it can be assumed that the de-contextualized prototype will be restored in the memory with either additional attributes (if applicable) or with differently rated attributes (e.g. an attribute with low ratings of typicality is re-stored as having an altered, possibly high, ratings). Based on the attribute pattern, a central category member could be pushed to the periphery of a particular category while a marginal category member could obtain a more central place. Let us assume that the speaker / message sender in example (1) compared features of different types of housing and finally bought a prefabricated house from the company Schwabenhaus. Prior to the house buying decision process, the speaker was not aware of the different attributes of a prefabricated house as opposed to the ones of a house made of bricks and mortar, but the house category was dominated by the bricks and mortar house. After the house buying decision process, the house category is stored in the memory enriched with new attributes (e.g. made of wooden frames). The same could apply to the reader / hearer and other putative message recipients that may undergo a restructuring of the house category. What is more, the re- evaluation of a particular category at an individual level could trigger a more far- reaching re-organization of the category for larger groups of people, which diachronically could lead to a complete change of the category structure (e.g. it can be speculated that the prefabricated house could become the de-contextualized prototype of the house category in about 100 years).
After outlining the prototype theory, whose implications will be explored for my analysis of the HOUSE metaphor (Sections 12.4., “Stony House or Sweet Home”, and
13.2.2., “Intracultural covert variation”), I shall illustrate the central claims of the traditional theory of metaphors and, subsequently, examine the main tenets of the conceptual metaphor theory.