Concepts, Words, Categories

November 4, 2016

Concepts, Words, Categories

A few weeks ago in my Linguistic Anthropology discussed Culture as Cognition and Culture as Categorization.  One of the most interesting parts of this chapter was the section about concepts, words, and categories. In this section the authors discuss how the semiotic triangle plays a huge role in the way we use language (Salzmann, Stanlaw, Adachi, 2015). The semiotic triangle is made of thought, symbol, and the referent. An example pulled from the book Language, Culture, and Society a physical referent brings up thoughts of trees, which brings up thoughts about trees, then giving rise to the spoken symbol. (Salzmann, Stanlaw, Adachi, 2015). The semiotic triangle can be altered in many different ways to help us make different connections between objects in the world, words that represent them, and the thoughts that the specific words conjure up. To add to that, concepts and words create categories.  A concept is a nonlinguistic thought representation of a category. Then a word is a verbal manifestation within a specific category.  Concepts are what help us make connections between our past experiences and our present experiences. Categories are what help us understand that no two objects in the world are entirely the same. Along with that categories act as a bridge that help us decide the differences between two things and what is and isn’t important. Without categories our memories would be useless. Moreover society would have to basically relearn different experiences each time it happens. 

References

Salzmann, Z., Stanlaw, J., & Adachi, N (2015). Chapter 11: Culture as Cognition, Culture as Categorization. In Language, Culture, and Society: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology (6th ed., pp. 289-290). Boulder, CO: Westview Press.