Prototype theory

Mark Wilson emory2oo2 at hotmail.com
Wed Mar 7 16:44:19 EST 2001


Kimmo wrote:

-------
>Yes, semantics and pragmatics are two different things, but their
>distinction is not clear cut (or if it is made to be discrete, it is
>arbitrary), though sometimes practical and real. Linguists differ in how
>much they want to ascribe to semantics and how much to pragmatics. I
>prefer putting more on the semantics side, because theories of
>pragmatics do not really deal with conventionalized uses, but those are
>easily dealt with in semantics.
------

A light went off when I read that phrase "conventionalized uses." That is 
essentially the driving force behind Prototype Theory, right? That IS 
brilliant.

Are you saying that one should go about learning a language by examining the 
language's conventionalized uses? If so, I think Wallace and Fanning follow 
this model more closely than Porter. What this has done for me has been to 
expose the presuppositions behind the Wallace/Fanning versus Porter debates.

Wallace/Fanning appear to give far more weight to conventionalized use, and 
Porter gives "much more" weight to unconventionalized uses. Would this be a 
fair assessment? (This is not to imply that one side is right and the other 
wrong.)

Also, Alan Thomas' insight into not "disecting grammatical units" was most 
helpful to me, especially how this affects Wallace on gnomic aorists. 
Wallace, I assume Alan would say, cuts up a propositional level UNIT, and 
perhaps, in this instance, an unconventionalized use, into parts that can 
not be separated from the whole. To examine the letters c, a, and t really 
are unrelated to "cat." And to disect "the," "below," and "place," in order 
to examine how an adverb functions INSIDE this indivisible UNIT, seems like 
disecting an unconventional phrase unit into parts that make no sense 
individually.

Am I getting any of this?

Mark Wilson
_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com




More information about the B-Greek mailing list