Typical. Class Theory And Its Significance

Categorization is fundamental to all higher cognitive activity. For quite a long time, the linguistics has been closely concerned with categorization. This thesis mainly discusses the development and application of 'Prototype Theory and Basic Level Category' proposed by Eleanor Rosch during the psycholinguistic research of the internal structure of categories. Prototype in prototype theory is a concept category or the most salient or characteristic member in a linguistic category and all the other members are similar to it. Rosch states that human categorisation "should not be considered the arbitrary product of historical accident or of whimsy but rather the result of psychological principles of categorisation".Based on Wittgenstein's 'family resemblance', prototype approach better solved the serious problem of categorization, which the classical view of categorization failed to explain. Prototype categories have not only the functional advantage of offering "maximum information with the least cognitive effort", but according to Geeraerts, they also "maintain themselves to changing circumstances and new expressive needs".In addition, prototype theory has been widely applied in the study of grammar, semantics and many other linguistic fields, especially in English tense learning and word learning.