Forms of meaning, meaning of forms

Abstract

Abstract If work in psychology has clearly brought to light that 'conceptual flexibility' exists in the categorization of objects, which led to re-questioning the traditional conception of categorization which considers rigid and discontinuous categories, it is not the case in linguistics and psycholinguistics. We propose, through highlighting the role of analogy in the categorization of verbs, to defend the idea of semantic flexibility which constitutes a linguistic counterpart to psychologists' advances on categorization. Accordingly, it is shown that the production of 'metaphoric' verbal utterances by adults and more particularly by 2/3-year-old children reflects analogical categorization of verbs which makes it possible to argue in favour of a computational model of the role of analogy in the semantic network of the verb lexicon. Keywords: CategorizationAnalogyActionVerb SemanticsApproximation By AnalogyComputational ModelMetaphorymyReal-GRAPHSSmall-WORLDS