Eckhard Bick - VISL

order to choose the right translation equivalent, or in order to resolve a metaphor,
polysemy crosses over thesauric branches for every new word sense, allowing the
prototype similarity technique to work:
prototypes distinguishing features
marsvin fish or rabbit? ±SWIM, ±WATER-PLACE
fato clothing, group or abstract? ±CONCRETE, ±ANIM
sild fish or human? ±HUM
carta furiosa book or human? ±HUM, ±READABLE
Itamarati house or human group? ±HUM, ±PLACE
træ plant or material? ±COUNT, ±MASS
Senses that are simply thesauric hyponyms of a standard general meaning of the term,
however, are more problematic - at least where a bilingual view point is taken, and
where the target language doesn’t share the hyperonym-hyponym-structure of the
source language, - in particular, where the target language lacks the hyperonym
concerned. An example is the Portuguese word ‘dedo’ which can mean both ‘toe’ and
‘finger’ in English. The meanings of the English translations are, of course, thesauric
hyponyms of ‘dedo’, and are therefore difficult to distinguish by prototype similarity.
The choices of prototypes on the one hand, and minimal distinction criteria on the
other, appear to be interdependent, and I want to argue that the best list of prototypes is
not the one that gives the best descriptions, but the shortest one that can handle the
sense distinctions given an operationally feasible list of distinction criteria. Likewise,
for my purpose, the best list of minimal distinction criteria is not the one that allows
perfect compositional semantic analysis of all word senses, but the shortest one that can
resolve prototype similarity for all semantic prototypes. After all, it is easier to single
out an Italian by the native language he speaks, than by defining a prototypical darkhaired
gesticulating wine-consuming pasta-eater, since nowadays, you would find a lot
of those among other nationalities, too.
6.3 A semantic landscape
One can imagine semantic prototypes as multidimensional bubbles in a
multidimensional semantic landscape, where the dimensions (or co-ordinates) are
expressed as semantic features, and the balloons are feature bundles. Binary semantic
features (±HUM, ±MOVE) are about “hemisphere” membership, east-west, north-south
etc. I will call such features atomic semantic features. For other features, like size,
temperature, colour, prototypes will allow a certain (fuzzy) range along a dimension.
Sometimes, these ranges will be subdivisions of what could be expressed as one
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