Universality and language specificity in prototypicality

In what can be considered as the starting point (or at least, one of the starting points) of the prototype theory, Berlin & Kay (1969) showed that, while the boundaries of colour terms seem to display considerable cross-linguistic variability, focal colours, that is the best examples of the colour terms, appear to be strikingly similar cross-linguistically. Other studies, including Heider (1972), built on this work and confirmed the universality of focal colours. In subsequent research on prototypes, universality was largely taken for granted. Gradually, however, voices began to be raised suggesting that prototypes may be culturally determined (cf. Field 2004). In this presentation, I will study the question of the universality (or otherwise) of prototypes from a linguistic perspective. While several linguists recognise the influence of language on categorisation, presenting prototypes as language-specific (e.g. Winters 1990), others seem to consider prototypicality as a language-independent, and hence universal, phenomenon (see, for example, Newman’s [1993] description of the prototypical scenario of giving). In an attempt to settle the issue, a cross-linguistic study of high-frequency verbs will be conducted. High-frequency verbs have obvious equivalents in most languages (Viberg 1996) and are generally assumed to have a prototypical sense (see e.g. Lee [1996] on 'make'), which makes them prime candidates for such a study. Unlike most studies of prototypes in cognitive linguistics, this one will be based on empirical data in the form of elicitation tests aimed at determining the sense that comes first to people’s minds when they are presented with a word. These tests, performed among native speakers of English, Dutch and French, will reveal the extent to which speakers of different languages have the same prototypes or not. The results will also be compared with corpus data in the three languages in order to establish the influence of language on one’s sense of prototypicality