Semantic Categorization and Cognition

One crucial way in which individuals learn about the cultural practices of the community in which they grow up is through language. By gaining an understanding of the language spoken by such a community, social scientists may also arrive at a better understanding of the cultures they are interested in, as argued by one of the pioneers of linguistic anthropology, Franz Boas (1858–1942). His primary experience as an anthropologist was with the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) and other First Nations in Canada. Boas saw lexical categories as experience-derived classifications, and thereby as one way in which human beings deal with the complexity of their environment. Such categories tend to be organized into semantic fields, the latter representing collections of words together covering a complete conceptual field. These words may represent concepts, they may name or refer to objects, and they may also categorize the latter.