Ugliness as a Prototype Category: Cognitive-and-Semantic Analysis

Abstract

The study proposes a cognitive-and-semantic approach to the study of the category ‘urodstvo’ (‘ugliness’). This approach allowed, using a component analysis of the meanings of words - denote main lexical representatives of the category of ugliness in the Russian language, and establish a set of features of the category relevant to the basic level. Several prototypical features of ugliness have been identified: ‘the carrier of the feature is a living organism (human, animal, plant)’; ‘abnormality in the structure’; ‘innate abnormality’; ‘its physical (anatomical) character’. An exemplary representative of a category has all the prototypical features in contrast to non-exemplary representatives. Blurring of prototypical features in non-ideal representatives of the category is carried out in the process of development and expansion of the semantics of the words urodstvo (‘ugliness’), bezobraziye (‘deformity’), nekrassivost’ (‘unattractiveness’) in Russian.

Keywords

• ugliness
• prototype
• component analysis
• categorization
• deformity
• unattractiveness