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THE LINGUISTICS STUDENT’S HANDBOOK 28
are really adjectives at all. Or, if we are unwilling to accept such a conclusion,
we need a bigger set of substitution frames to solve the problem – though such
frames are not necessarily easy to produce.
Then we have the problem that substitution classes frequently produce
strange bed-fellows. If we take a substitution frame such as The ___ man, we
might end up with the walk man, the remittance man, the fancy man, the lady’s
man; we should at least be worried by calling all of these things ‘adjectives’.
The problem for the structuralists is that there are too many possible substitution
frames, some rather specific, some very general, and they all delimit
different classes. Thus, in effect, we end up with a vast set of possible parts of
speech, with little reason to believe that some are more important than others.
Fortunately, linguists were saved from this quagmire by psychologists, or more
specifically by one psychologist, Eleanor Rosch.
Psychology to the rescue
Rosch (e.g. 1978) argued that people do not view natural categories in terms of
necessary and sufficient conditions. Rather, in many cases, they have a mental
image of some kind of ideal, and members of the class which resemble the ideal
closely are more quickly recognised than members which are distant from the
ideal. Thus a robin (not the same bird in North America as in the United
Kingdom or as in Australasia) is more easily recognised as a bird than an ostrich
or a penguin, for example. These ideals Rosch unfortunately termed prototypes
(this is quite out of keeping with earlier meanings of prototype; archetype
or stereotype would have been a much better label, but it is too late to change
that now). But however unfortunate the label, the idea is powerful and helpful.
For now we can return to the notional theory of the parts of speech and give it
a far firmer theoretical anchor than it used to have. Although traditional grammarians
may have treated concepts like noun as prototypes, we had no way to
theorise what they were doing, and it seemed that they were simply wrong.
Now we have a theoretical framework within which to describe what is going
on, and a more subtle idea of what a category might look like.
Now we can say that the prototypical noun denotes some concrete individual
object. We might be able to go further and suggest that the best examples of
nouns (compare robins as the best examples of birds) denote humans. So woman
is a really good noun, close to the prototype, while criticism is a noun because
our language happens to deal with it grammatically in much the same way as it
deals with woman,but it is nevertheless further from the prototype. Similarly, a
verb like kill is probably fairly close to the prototype for a verb, while seem is a
lot further away. They belong to the same category because the language inflects
them in the same way (kills, killed; seems, seemed). A prototypical adjective may
fit all the frames in (3), but things can be adjectives and yet fit less well into our