ABSTRACT
There is a recent tradition of work in anthropology and in psychology which can be interpreted as providing both evidence about the relationships between categories grouped into frameworks, and as an attempt at explaining the principles governing the grouping of individuals into categories. From this work it emerges that in some areas of vocabulary at least the hypothesis that the corresponding categorial frameworks are a series of possibly overlapping taxonomic structures is correct, at least in outline. Furthermore, there seem to be some interesting universally shared properties belonging to these taxonomic structures which may give a clue to the principles underlying their formation.
