Folk Zoological Life‐Forms: Their Universality and Growth

Folk zoological life‐form terms, like folk botanical life‐form terms (Brown 1977a), are added to languages in a highly regular manner. Life‐forms of the triad FISH, BIRD, and SNAKE are lexically encoded first, although in no particular order, followed by WUG (e.g., American English hug) and then MAMMAL. Four general principles of naming‐behavior underlie these regularities: (1) criteria clustering; (2) conjunctivity (including binary opposition); (3) dimension salience; and (4) marking. In addition, size of folk zoological life‐form vocabularies is positively correlated with societal complexity. This is caused by the decay of folk biological taxonomies as societies become more complex. [cognitive anthropology, ethnobiology, folk classification, language universals, language change]