Implications And Applications Of Prototype Theory

The cognitive-scientific study of prototype offers a new perspective of categorization. Many cognitive linguists discover that people learn categories from a typical example, not from abstract principles or qualities. And they think about categories by referring to such an example. Consider, for instance, what happens when one is asked to imagine a category such as"tree", usually a typical instance of this category is immediately called to mind. The experimental investigation of this prototype effect leads to the prototype view becoming firmly established in the field of human cognitive psychology. Prototype theory is a theory of categorization. The best example of a category is a prototype. Prototypes are used as a reference point in making judgements of the similarities and differences in other experiences and things in the world. For instance, states that in comparison to other types of birds the features of robins are judged to be more representative of the category"bird"by Americans. Categories are not internally unstructured; rather some members are prototypical or central or representative of the category, while others are marginal or peripheral. Thus from the central to the marginal, all kinds of birds form a graded structure within one category"bird".Rosch's early experiments on prototypicality effects reported a very high agreement between subjects on typicality rankings: over .9, which is about as high as you can get: it means that if you know one person's typicality rankings you will be able to predict about 90% of other people's rankings. Barsalou performed another test, in experimental work of his own, with a variety of concepts from the taxonomic to the goal-directed to the ad hoc, he found that agreement between subjects on all three types of concepts averages at .5-- a substantially lower result. According to the experimental findings of Eleanor Rosch and Barsalou I analysed why and how the internal structure of prototypical categorization changed.This paper mainly discussed prototypical features, prototypical structures and prototypical effects. It has been proposed that prototype theory can be used to explain the grammar categorization and it is influential in the process of language acquisition. Basing on the prototypical structure the thesis presented how the prototype theory is applied to the grammar categorization of the modal auxiliaries. The study of prototype is mainly based on an approach of exemplification, while particular issues are more extensively revealed and they are far beyond what I could research. Just as what the paper has showed, the prototypical structure is not as much stable as expected. Moreover, in some conditions the non-prototypical phenomena still get people confused. Therefore, the existence of prototype does not cover everything.