The Cultural Dependency of Prototypes or How Bad Birds Are Able to Survive

Abstract or Introduction

The use of language in our everyday life is an automatic process we usually do not reflect on. Nevertheless - or perhaps for exactly this reason- it is influenced by the speech community we live in. Our own culture provides us with a world view that is different from all other cultures and influences our language in that it determines which concepts are salient and worth being articulated. (Saeed 1997: 42)
Prototype theory as founded by the US-American linguist Eleanor Rosch in the 1970s is an area of research situated between linguistics and psychology and deals with the internal structure of categories. Rosch pointed out that many categories cannot be defined through necessary and sufficient conditions but rather show a prototypical structure. This structure is organised by degree of membership and typicality of members of a category. As a result, there exist bad birds and better birds, good fruit, less good fruit and so on. It is a well-known fact that prototypical knowledge has significant impact on the representation of and dealing with linguistic and conceptional structures. (Bußmann 2002: 543)
In the following paper I am going to analyse in how far culture can influence our perception of concepts and also our usage of language. The first chapter deals with theoretical facts on prototype theory. The second one provides information on cultural differences due to prototypes and gives examples.