Prototype semantics: The English Word Lie

PROTOTYPE SEMANTICS: THE ENGLISH WORD LIE Linda Coleman and Paul Kay University of California, Berkeley The meaning of the word lie ('prevaricate') consists in a cognitive prototype to which various real or imagined events may correspond in varying degrees. This view contrasts with the familiar one in which word meanings consist of sets of necessary and sufficient conditions, and distinguish discretely between instances and non-instances. The relevance of the notions of prototype and gradience in semantics has previously been established in physical and sensory lexical domains. The present paper shows that these notions are also relevant in abstract and social domains. Results are reported from an experiment which supports this view.* Received notions of word meaning in linguistics are based on the idea of the semantic feature or component:1 semantic features are discrete properties (or relations), and they contrast discretely with one another. The meaning of a word is represented as a set of features, possibly with a single member. Variations on this standard theme differ in that some see the set of discretely contrasting features as having no further structure (as in, the writings of anthropological semanticists such as Wallace cf. Kay 1978, Fillmore 1975, and Lakoff 1972. In the philosophy of language, Putnam has recently...