Natural kind terms and folk taxonomies
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| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Folk knowledge of the world (as defined by Apresjan 1992, Wierzbicka 1996) differs from scientific knowledge. Folk taxonomies are considerably simpler than their scientific counterparts, with only a partial overlap between names of classes in science and so-called life forms in (not only) biological sciences. Although both of them are polytypic, life forms must be distinguished from folk genera, which are only sometimes conceived as having different kinds (i.e. polytypic), usually when they are culturally central to the speakers of the given language. The paper looks into the correspondence between natural kind terms (Cruse 1986) and life forms as well as terms at the taxonomically generic level, and seeks to identify the position of periphrastic nominal kind terms at the subgeneric or more abstract levels of hierarchies. Gaps caused by classificatory misconceptions in folk taxonomies are highlighted and comparison is made between English and Czech folk biological taxonomies. |