122226 SE Linguistics Seminar / MA historical & descriptive linguistics (2016S)

The notion of categorization plays a crucial role in any approach to grammar, whether descriptive, generative, functional or cognitive: one cannot do linguistics without assuming the existence (in some form or other) of linguistic categories. What linguists disagree about, however, is the nature of those categories. Are they discrete and clear-cut, i.e. is category membership a matter of all or nothing? Or are grammatical categories blurred at the edges, with some members being better examples than others? And if the latter, is it always possible (and desirable) to determine category membership at all? In this course, two basic approaches to categorization – the classical approach and the prototype approach - are compared and tested on categories within the fields of semantics, morphology, syntax and phonology.