[Lexicog] Re: Palm trees

[Rudolph Troike]

   Just a small note re emic categorization. I did a little cross-cultural
check with some international students awhile back on the categories "fruit"
vs "vegetable", just asking for the first 10 items under (the native term for)
each category. I was primarily looking for protoypicality in these categories,
so asked respondents to just list them in the order they came to mind. A
couple of interesting things emerged in comments added. A Turkish respondent
commented that the most prototypical item that would emerge would be
determined by the season, since different items dominated the diet at different
times. This would be an emic sorting feature, and would suggest that in non-
tropical areas, the season of the year would be salient. A Taiwanese respon-
dent commented that "apple" was the prototypical fruit since it had been so
expensive that they might have a chance to eat only one a year (imported from
Japan), and this gave it premier status among fruits. I believe that school
experience strongly influenced a lot of responses, particularly at the top
of the scale, since national elementary school textbooks typically introduce
sorting and matching exercises, and commonly select things like apples and
oranges for this purpose (and in alphabetically-written languages, for
spelling association).

    In these days of globalization of trade, when food items can be
distributed across hemispheres and seasonality becomes less salient, and
education becomes more universal, a lot of original emic differences will
disappear, so if they are being sought for scientific purposes, it will be
necessary to seek out older respondents before it is too late to document
these distinctions/categories. For practical purposes, the institutionally
homogenized (Westernized?) categories will be the salient ones for most
indigenous dictionary-users in the future.

    Rudy

P.S. A student of mine some years ago did a color categorization study
on Korean for his dissertation. He found that among older rural males, only
two color categories were recognized -- the men sometimes referred him to
their wives for more "expert" distinctions. The wives usually distinguished
only 5 or so categories. Among college students, males might distinguish up
to 10 or 15, while females routinely distinguished 20-30. This suggests that
culture and sex roles form important variables in making categorizations, an
issue that would have to be considered in looking for emic distinctions.
For lexicographical purposes, any distinctions made by one speaker would
have to be validated by testing with others. This would be particularly true
for items where knowledge is differentially distributed by sex or age or
occupation within a group.










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