Categorization in the history of English (review)

The editors, Christian J. Kay and Jeremy J. Smith, mention in the preface that the main themes of this volume are, first, to show ‘The establishment of categories and the analysis of meaning in diachronic contexts, with an underlying theme of linguistic change’ and, second, a ‘Cross-linguistic comparison’ (vii). In order to achieve these themes the editors included twelve papers, ten of which are revised versions of papers presented at a symposium on classification and categorization at the University of Glasgow in 1999.

The volume begins with Jean Aitchison, who organizes the development of categorization into the stages that linguistic research has gone through, focusing on words in the mental lexicon. C. P. Biggam lists some of the important general principles in color semantics research and how theorists have dealt with them. Andreas Fischer discusses the differences between universalist and culture-specific thesauruses and concludes that works differ widely in the ways in which they divide the world of words/concepts. Christian J. Kay shows the problem of classification and the cognitive strategies that speakers employ in assigning meaning to particular categories.

Grzegorz A. Kleparski discusses the analysis of the conceptual macrocategory (female human being) and how some lexical meanings related to this concept have developed. The paper by Margaret Laing and Keith Williamson about the archaeology of medical texts illustrates how the techniques of linguistic analysis can help to sort out different elements in complex textual traditions. Roger Lass deals with texts as linguistic objects and shows that historical texts from Old English are pieces of linguistic data that should be taken as written utterances. Agnieszka Mikolajczuk talks about the general category of anger in Polish and English by examining lexemes from four groups in the two languages and discussing their historical development.

Cerwyss O’Hare discusses folk and scientific categorization of plants and animals in thesauruses of Old English and stresses the importance and satisfactory results of using scientific and cultural categorization of lexemes side by side. The paper by Hans Peters focuses on the analysis of the vocabulary of pain in English and provides a historical sketch as well. Jeremy J. Smith’s paper deals with the classification of vowels in Middle English and the historical development of certain vowels in Old English and Middle English. The last paper, by Louise Sylvester, considers two large-scale conceptual arrangements of vocabulary—the electronic lexical database WorldNet and the historical thesaurus of English—and shows the relationship between the two projects.

The editors have been very judicious in crafting a comprehensive and insightful study of categorization. The authors of the papers provide us with representative examples from historical texts and clearly present their methodologies and results. The editors gave an additional bonus by offering a large number of research questions for future work. This book should provide readers who have little or no knowledge about categorization with excellent examples about the concept. It also provides the more knowledgeable with many new and original viewpoints.