Grammatical category and world view: Western colonization of the Dyirbal language
1995; De Gruyter Mouton; Volume: 6; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1515/cogl.1995.6.4.379
ISSN1613-3641
Autores Tópico(s)Multilingual Education and Policy
ResumoLakoff (1987) presents the noun class system of Dyirbal, an indigenous Australian language, as a prototypical example of categories conforming to his theory of categories. He takes as the title of his book a summary of the concepts encoded by nouns belonging to the so-called feminine gender of Dyirbal: women, fire and dangerous things, and suggests that the prototypical members of two of the four noun classes are human males and human females respectively. (The other two classes are described as “vegetable food'” and “everything else”.) It is argued in this paper that Lak off proposed a human sex-based analysis of these two classes, not because this analysis best fits the data, but as a result of applying western cognitive models to the analysis. If the noun category system of Dyirbal is analyzed in terms of potency and harmony, it can be seen to be more relevant to the experience and cognitive needs of the Dyirbal-speaking people than is indicated by Lakoff's analysis. The noun class system of Dyirbal is shown not to be constructed around real-world entities as prototypes, but around sets of properties which define the categories.
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