Metaphor for Categories

Catie Berkenfield catieb at UNM.EDU
Fri Feb 11 18:13:19 UTC 2000


Hi all,

In fact, Miller, Joanne. 1994. On the internal structure of phonetic
categories: a progress report.  Cognition 50: 271-285 shows evidence for
graded phonetic category structure which supports both the prototype and
exemplar models.

Also look for Joan Bybee's forthcoming Phonology and Language Use (John
Benjamins, in preparation) for critique of the classical phoneme analysis.

Does anyone else have recommended readings on this topic? I would be
particularly interested in anything on the association of what are
traditionally "segments" and what are usually characterized as independent
prosodic features. For instance, if a particular construction tends to
take a particular kind of sentence stress (eg an element of a predictable
grammatical construction), how do we represent this in our grammar? Do the
vocalic "segments" remain as full vowels or does the vowel representation
change due to a very regular (reduced) prosodic environment?

And, is this process quantitatively different from representation of
vowels in clearly lexical items? which also always occur in constructions.

Catie Berkenfield
Department of Linguistics
University of New Mexico


On Thu, 10 Feb 2000, Tony Wright wrote:

> At 01:33 PM 2/10/00 -0600, Janet Wilson wrote:
>
> > I think there is a good metaphor for prototype categories--they are more
> like > piles than like containers. Two reasons (there are more, but these
> are at the > forefront of my thinking) for liking the metaphor of "piles" are:
>
> > 1.    When a container is empty, there is still something there. When a
> pile > is empty, there is nothing.
>
> > 2.    A container imposes its shape (form) on the contents. A pile, on
> the > other hand, gets its shape from the contents.
>
> I agree!  Also, I would add that things are typically in a container or not
> in a container (with some exceptions).  But things can be in or near a
> pile, or in between two piles, etc.
>
> I have often wondered how it would be if we re-cast the classical notion of
> the phoneme in terms of "fuzzy regions in phonetic space."  Opinions?
>
> --Tony Wright
>



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