Language, culture, and prototypicality

Prototype theory is closely linked to the work of the American cognitive psychologist Eleanor Rosch and her colleagues. This work has profoundly changed the mainstream model of human categorisation, far beyond its original home territory in psychology. Although several elements of what was to become ‘prototype theory’ had been established and worked out by earlier researchers, it is the studies of Rosch and her colleagues (see below for references and the overview in Rosch 1978) that have convinced researchers across the various disciplines that it is not necessary to describe their data in terms of the classical model of categories. The significant impact of these studies is reflected by the term ‘Roschian revolution’, which is commonly used for the perspective shifts they initiated in the 1970s.