Wierzbicka, Anna (1992). Furniture and birds: A reply to Dwight Bolinger. Cognitive Linguistics, 3(1), 119-123. DOI: 10.1515/cogl.1992.3.1.111
No full-fledged explications are proposed in this short reply to Dwight Bolinger’s reaction following the publication of Wierzbicka’s paper “Prototypes save: On the uses and abuses of the notion ‘prototype’ in linguistics and related fields” (1990). The reply suggests, against Bolinger (for whom furniture and bird are comparable categories), that the explication of collective categories such as furniture, cutlery, kitchenware, clothing, or bedlinen should start as follows:
things of different kinds
they are in the same place
(because people want them to be in the same place)
In the case of taxonomic concepts such as bird, tree, flower, or fish, the beginning of the explications will be different and refer instead to “a kind of thing”.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
