Semantics: a coursebook, second edition

U N I T   8
Words and things: extensions and prototypes
89
(4) Could a skyscraper be a prototype for the predicate
building for someone who had spent his life in Britain
(outside London)?
Yes / No
(5) Could a palm tree (like that pictured in a practice above) 
be a prototype for someone who has lived since birth on 
a tropical island, say in Hawai’i?
Yes / No
(6) Could a parrot (or other similar large brightly coloured 
bird) be a prototype for someone who has lived her life 
in the rain forest?
Yes / No
Feedback
(1) Yes (2) No, probably not (3) Yes (4) No (5) Yes (6) Yes
Comment You will be able to think of other examples of cultural di
fferences leading to
di
fferent prototypes.
The idea of a prototype is perhaps most useful in explaining how people
learn to use (some of) the predicates in their language correctly. Recent
research on the acquisition of categories in human language indicates that
the prototypical members of the extension of a predicate are usually learned
earlier than non-prototypical members. Predicates like man, cat, dog are often
first taught to toddlers by pointing out to them typical examples of men, cats,
dogs, etc. A mother may point to a cat and tell her child ‘That’s a cat’, or point
to the child’s father and say ‘Daddy’s a man’. This kind of de
finition by
pointing is called ostensive de
finition. It is very plausible to believe that a
child’s 
first concepts of many concrete terms are induced by ostensive
de
finition involving a prototype. Obviously, however, not all concepts can be
learned in this way.
Practice (1) Could the predicate bottle be de
fined ostensively, by 
pointing to a prototypical bottle?
Yes / No
(2) Is it likely that the predicate battle would be learned 
by ostensive de
finition?
Yes / No
(3) Are predicates for various external body-parts, e.g.
chin, nose, eye, leg, elbow, most probably 
first learned 
from ostensive de
finitions?
Yes / No
(4) Are colour predicates, such as red, blue, green, yellow,
probably 
first learned from ostensive definitions?
Yes / No
(5) Could the meaning of ambition be learned from a simple 
ostensive de
finition (i.e. by someone pointing to an 
ambitious man and saying ‘That’s ambition’ or 
even ‘He’s an ambitious man’)?
Yes / No
(6) Could the meaning of electricity be de
fined ostensively?
Yes / No

PA RT  T WO
From reference . . .
90
Feedback
(1) Yes (2) No, although one might just possibly learn the meaning of
battle from being shown a battle in a movie. (3) Yes (4) Yes, most likely
(5) No, someone who doesn’t know the meaning of ambition couldn’t
identify the relevant quality just by being shown an ambitious man.
(6) No, it’s di
fficult to see how this could happen.
Comment Some predicates which do not have clearly de
fined extensions (e.g. colour
terms like red and blue) do in fact have clear prototypes. In
fluential research
in the 1960s by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay demonstrated that although one
cannot be sure exactly where red shades o
ff into pink or orange, for
example, there is general agreement in the English speech community about
the central, focal, or prototypical examples of red. Thus the idea of
prototype has at least some advantage over that of extension. But in other
cases, such as abstract mass terms (e.g. ambition) there is about as much
di
fficulty in identifying the prototype of a predicate as there is of
identifying its extension.
We conclude by repeating de
finitions of referent, extension, and prototype
below.
Definition The REFERENT of a referring expression is the thing picked out by the use
of that expression on a particular occasion of utterance.
The EXTENSION of a predicate is the complete set of all things which
could potentially (i.e. in any possible utterance) be the referent of a referring
expression whose head constituent is that predicate.
A PROTOTYPE of a predicate is a typical member of its extension.
Comment We make a distinction between prototype and stereotype: we will de
fine
stereotype in the next unit. In other texts, the two terms are often used
interchangeably. A further term, which we will have an occasional use for, is
‘denotation’. In many cases denotation can be thought of as equivalent to
extension. Thus, for example, the predicate cat can be said to denote the set
of all cats. But often the term is used in a wider, essentially vaguer, sense,
especially in connection with predicates whose extensions are
problematical. Thus one may 
find statements about meaning such as
‘redness denotes the property common to all red things’, or ‘ambition
denotes a human quality’, or ‘the preposition under denotes a spatial
relationship’.
Summary Reference, extension, and prototype all focus attention on the relationship 
between words and things. Clearly, language does not exist in a vacuum. It
is used to make statements about the world outside, and these three notions
are useful in an analysis of exactly how the relationship between language
and the world works.

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