Relewancja i redundancja w nabywaniu kategorii semantycznych z zakresu nauki o języku

Abstract

The paper deals with roles that relevance and redundancy play in the process of acquisition lexical items from the sphere of linguistics. Referring to notions like category, linguistic category, semantic category and semantic function as well as processes of categorization and classification the author makes an attempt to state what elements should be acknowledged as relevant and what ones as redundant in acquisition knowledge of language. It should be emphasized that categorization and classification are understood here as different processes leading either to building particular categories by gathering adequate features (categorization) or to creating hierarchic structure of a lexicon (classification). In acquisition of semantic categories both processes mentioned above play important roles but categorization is acknowledged as primary compared with operations of classifying that appear only in the early school period of cognitive development. Hitherto existing settlements from the sphere of cognitive psychology and semantics allow to state that relevance of semantic features creating categories depends on a context (scientific or colloquial utterances) and is graduated (conditioned by personal or social experiences). Because both a context and gradation belong to basic criteria defining the principle of relevance (Sperber and Wilson), the author makes an attempt to apply the principle to a description of the acquisition of semantic categories. An analysis of pupils’ (the third form of primary school) opinions on human communication allowed to separate both main categories and prototypical subcategories referring to each of them. On the basis of the gathered material it was also possible to observe the inner structure of particular categories (basic, superordinate, and subordinate levels). Based on the principle of relevance method of diagnostic procedure appeared to be useful in evaluating levels of relevance of particular elements creating semantic categories. The levels of relevance reflect cognitive and educational efforts concomitant with the acquisition of metalinguistic knowledge.