Seeing clearly: Frame Semantic, Psycholinguistic, and Cross ...

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 8
rather, we expect to nd connections between them based on general cognitive principles.
For example, we expect that people will often classify things and events on the basis of
perceived similarity, and that to a large extent, people will agree on those similarities and
those classi cations. As Lako (1987:Ch. 6) has shown, the basis of the classi cation can
be quite complex, but it is not completely arbitrary. Wide-ranging psychological results
have also shown that certain types of categorization are more basic than others, and that
the tendency of certain events to co-occur is one of the bases of such categorization.
Category Structure and Gradation
Questions about the adequacy of Aristotelian de nitions have also raised questions
about the assumptions on which they are based, such as the \Law of the Excluded Middle",
which says that for any set X, any individual must be either in or out of the set. If X
represents the set of things having the attribute A, then we cansay that any individual
must be either A or not A; philosophers have spilled a lot of ink over what to do about
cases in which an attribute seems to be neither true nor false of an individual, but simply
inapplicable, e.g. is the number 3 blue or not?
A new spurt of interest in these questions began in the 1970s with the research
of Eleanor Rosch and her associates. They found that for many types of categories, it was
possible to measure not just whether or not an instance was a member of the category, but
whether or not the instance was a \good example" of the category; these judgements of
whether an instance is a better or worse example of a category have been called \represen-
tativeness", \exemplariness", \graded category structure", and \prototype e ects"; I will
use the last term. Prototype e ects have been found to be very robust and to be manifest
in a variety of measures (Rosch 1978; Rosch in press).
There was an initial burst of excitement after the rst discovery of prototype e ects
in which itwas assumed that they were a direct re ection of the mental representation
of the concept. It was gradually discovered that this was incorrect, but this fallacious
interpretation of the data has plagued the eld ever since. Lako (1987:136 .) claims that
the error arises from two incorrect interpretations of e ects: (1) E ects = Structure and
(2) Prototype = Representation. The former assumes that if there is variation in ratings of
\goodness of example" over a group of items that this means that the category in question