Natural Kind Terms and Folk Taxonomies
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | From Theory to Practice 2016: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Anglophone Studies, vol. 8 |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Keywords | folk genera; folk taxonomies; life forms; natural kind terms; polytypic; scientific taxonomies |
| Attached files | |
| Description | Folk knowledge of the world 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 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. This paper considers 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 a comparison is made between English and Czech folk biological taxonomies. |