Wierzbicka, Anna (1990). ‘Prototypes save’: On the uses and abuses of the notion of ‘prototype’ in linguistics and related fields. In Savas L. Tsohatzidis (Ed.), Meanings and prototypes: Studies in linguistic categorization (pp. 347-367). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
A more recent publication building on this one is chapter 4 (pp. 148-169) of:
Wierzbicka, Anna (1996). Semantics: Primes and universals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
The original paper has been anthologized as:
Wierzbicka, Anna (2004). ‘Prototypes save’. In Bas Aarts, David Denison, Evelien Keizer, & Gergana Popova (Eds.), Fuzzy grammar: A reader (pp. 461-478). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
The original Tsohatzidis collection was reissued in 2013 by Routledge.
Prototypes are ‘in’. After years of self-doubt and inferiority complexes, it may seem that semantics has found the key to unlock – at last – the mysteries of meaning. This key resides in the concept of prototype. The role that the concept of prototype plays in current semantics is analogous to that which the concept of Gricean maxims has played in generative grammar. James McCawley has identified this role with the excellent slogan: “Grice saves”. In grammar, if there is a conflict between postulated rules and the actual usage, Grice rescues the grammarian: the usage can now be accounted for in terms of Gricean maxims.
Similarly in semantics. For example, the actual usage of individual words is too messy, too unpredictable, to be accounted for by definitions. But fortunately, semanticists do not have to worry about it any longer: they can now deploy the notion of ‘prototype’. And just as the failure of grammatical rules to work can now be proclaimed as evidence of progress in linguistics (because we have discovered the all-explaining role of Gricean maxims in language), the failure of semantic formulae to work can also be proclaimed as evidence of progress in semantics. ‘Semantic formulae SHOULD NOT “work”’; that’s one thing that ‘prototypes’ have taught us.
This paper discusses two sets of examples. The first set illustrates the tendency to abuse the concept of prototype (the ‘prototypes save’ attitude); the second set of examples illustrates the usefulness of this concept when it is used as a specific analytical tool and not as a universal thought-saving device.
