Re: Schema and family resemblances in cognitive linguistics

"Young Sociolinguist" <spooky.fm@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Hello everyone, I'm a student of English from Poland. I'd be
grateful if you could tell me the difference between these two
concepts: _schema_ - 'an abstract characterisation that is fully
compatible with all the members of the category it defines (so
membership is not a matter of degree...' (Langacker 1987: 371) This
is illustrated by means of the tree category. (in Taylor 1989)

Never heard of this, but:

_the principle of family resemblances_ - 'a set of items of the form
AB, BC, CD, DE. That is, each item has at least one, and probably
several, elements in common with one or more other items, but no, or
few, elements are common to all items' (Rosch and Mervis 1975: 575).
Ungerer and Schmid (1996) provide the category 'birds' as an
example.

This idea is more commonly attributed to Wittgenstein, rather
earlier. You could look at the Philosophical Investigations
themselves or numerous commentators. In particular, this was
philosophy of language before it was "cognitive" anything.

In short, I think the two concepts may be the same thing, because they
both refer to categories whose members are so diverse that employing a
prototype would be too difficult.

They are not the same unless you assume (or discover) that all family
resemblances can be given an "abstract categorisation", which is not
obvious to me. How would you do this with birds, to borrow your
example?

Des
.

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