ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the classical theory of categorisation, which assumes necessary and sufficient conditions, and identified the problems inherent in this approach. Categorisation is of fundamental importance for both cognitive psychologists and semanticists, since both disciplines require a theory of categorisation in order to account for knowledge representation and indeed for linguistic meaning. The chapter concerns the work of George Lakoff, who addressed findings relating to prototype structure and basic level categories revealed by research in cognitive psychology, and who developed a cognitive semantic theory of idealized cognitive models (ICMs) in order to account for these phenomena. It considers image schematic ICMs, prepositional ICMs, metaphoric ICMs, metonymic ICMs and symbolic ICMs. The chapter looks at the findings to emerge from Rosch's research and explores the development of Lakoff's theory of cognitive models that was developed in response to this research. It explores the issue of linguistic categorisation in the light of the empirical findings and theoretical explanations.
