Prototype Theory

Prototype theory is a theory of categorization in cognitive science, particularly within psychology and cognitive linguistics, holding that membership in a conceptual category is graded rather than absolute, so that some members of a category are more central, or more prototypical, than others. It emerged in 1971 through the work of the psychologist Eleanor Rosch and has been described as a Copernican Revolution in the theory of categorization for breaking with the traditional Aristotelian view of categories, a break that has drawn criticism from linguists such as Eugenio Coseriu who continue to defend the structural semantics paradigm built on the older, traditional model. Under prototype theory, any concept in any given language has a real-world example that best represents it, so that when people are asked for an example of furniture, a couch is cited far more often than, say, a wardrobe; the theory has also been applied within linguistics as part of the mapping from phonological structure to semantics, and Rosch drew in formulating it on Ludwig Wittgenstein's earlier account of category membership through family resemblance and on Roger Brown's 1958 paper How Shall a Thing Be Called.