ABSTRACT
In this unit we shall apply our tools to a more complicated pair of concepts, ‘mother’ and ‘father’. Two facts about these concepts make them more complicated than ‘person’. The first fact is that they are relational-i.e. they are like ‘enemy’ rather than ‘bicycle’. Each one defines one person (the mother or father) in terms of their relationship to another person (the child), so in the case of ‘mother’ the mother is the value and the child is the argument. The diagram for the sense of MOTHER is as in (1), where Y could be the referent of a possessive such as my:
(1)
The second fact is that ‘mother’ and ‘father’ are excellent examples of prototypes, defined only in terms of clear cases rather than in terms of watertight boundaries. Let’s start with ‘mother’. Let’s assume an adult called Mary and a child called Charlie. In the simple case, the following facts (along with several others) will be true of the relation between Mary and Charlie:
(2)
a. Mary conceived Charlie-i.e. she supplied both the egg which eventually turned into Charlie, and the uterus in which the egg was fertilised.
