ABSTRACT
A major impetus for the emergence of Cognitive Linguistics, from the early 1980s onwards, was Eleanor Rosch’s work on categorization. Rosch addressed the question of the relation between words and the range of things in the world that the words can be used to refer to. The standard view of the matter had been (and in certain quarters still is) that an entity can be named by a word if, and only if, it exhibits each of the features which collectively define the meaning of the word. This so-called “classical” theory of categories entails (a) that word meanings can be defined in terms of sets of features, (b) that the features are individually necessary and jointly sufficient, (c) that words pick out categories of entities which exhibit each of the features, (d) that all members of a category have equal status within the category, and (e) that membership in a category is a clear-cut, all-or-nothing matter.
