Republic of the Philippines

Capiz State University

College of Education
Fuentes Drive, Roxas City, Capiz

ENG 104
Language, Culture and Society

Camille Beluso BSEd- English 1A Miraluna T. Sabid

Course Facilitator

Concepts, Words and Category

Objectives:
1. To define the concept, word and category
2. To distinguish the difference among concept, word and actegory

Some early rhetoricians argued that the things in the world (referents) and the words
(symbols) are mediated by concepts in the minds that underlie them (thought). This reflected in
the left diagram below, the famous “semantic triangle” of Ogden and Richards.

Ogden and Richards created the “Semantic Triangle.” The triangle is a simple model in which
the three factors involved with the statement or idea are placed in the corners and the
relationships between them are represented by the sides (Ogden and Richards, 1927, p. 10).

thought concept

symbol referent word category

One peak of the triangle would be the symbol such as the word.
Another peak would be a thought, such as words to describe the symbol.
Finally, The image we create in our minds would become the referent. 

Through the use of the Semantic Triangle, Ogden and Richards believe they have found a way to
connect all words to their meaning (Erickstad, 1998).
There are relationships between all three factors, represented by the sides of the triangle:
 - The relationship between the thought and symbol are causal
meaning the symbol evokes an attitude or a proposed effect on another person. 
- Similarly, there is a relationship between the thought and the referent,
though the relationship can be either direct, such as something we can see in front of us, or
indirect, such as an image or idea about something we have seen in another instance.
- Finally, the relationship between the symbol and the referent is purely indirect
in that it is an arbitrary relationship created by someone who wishes the symbol to represent the
referent (Ogden and Richards, 1927, p. 11).
An example of how this idea works is as follows:

Barking

Dog

As demonstrated by the illustration above, the word “dog” is associated in the mind of the reader
as a particular animal. The word is not the animal, but the association links the two, thus all three
elements
A unique andare required inquality
fascinating an irreducible
of Ogdentriad
and for the signs
Richards’ to operate
theory is thatcorrectly.
it implies meaning can be
arbitrarily exchanged without the need to understand how one another feels. What this means is that so
long as definitions are created that all parties agree to, feelings regarding those definitions are
inconsequential. In fact, according to Ogden and Richards (1927, p. 15),
“Whenever we hear anything said, we spring spontaneously to an immediate conclusion, namely,
that the speaker is referring to what we should be referring to we’re we speaking the words
ourselves.”
Concepts and Words are often not distinguish, and much of the literature uses the terms
interchangeably.
(Words and concepts are different: words always express concepts and concepts are always
expressed by words)
By Concept we mean a nonlinguistic psychological presentation of category or class entities in
the world.
A word is the linguistic-usually spoken-manifestation of that representation.
Concept, then are the mental glue (Murphy 2002:1) that ties experiences-our knowledge of
some category or class of objects in the world- with our present experience in labeling them
by means words
- It means that concepts embody our knowledge of the kinds of things there are in the world.
Tying our past experiences to our present interactions with the environment, they enable us to
recognize and understand new objects and events.
Categories are subtle – we can begin thinking about categories by realizing that two no objects
in the real world are exactly the same. No matter how close they may seem, given enough time
and attention to detail, we can always find some differences between them. If the differences do
not matter, the two items are placed in the same category. If these differences do make a
difference, then they are not.
Categories then are the bridge between and the necessity of making distinctions.
This has some important implications:
- A language or culture’s categories allow us to filter out the unimportant from the
important.
- Second, the human brain allow us to react to the world using categories instantaneously.
How and when we create categories is rather that complicated, and will be discussed in more
detail in the next section,
For now we can think of a category as a set of referents that is somehow grouped together.

Sometimes the terms “categories” and “concepts” are used interchangeably, and other
authors use them in somewhat different ways.
At any rate, there are five points to notice:
1. Categorization itself is not necessarily useful, but it is our ability to apply our knowledge
about the category that makes categorization useful.
2. Here we are not talking about a single referent, as in the classic semiotic triangle on the left
above, but of classes or kinds of referents.
This the analogous to the notion of the phoneme; that is a group of sounds that are
psychologically thought of being as the same (in spite of certain phonetic differences between
their allophones)
3. The essential aspect of cognition is the ability to categorize: to judge whether or not a
particular things is an instance of a particular category.
(Ex. Rover is a dog; Garfield is a Cat)
4. The category to apply categories successfully is “indispensable in using previous experience to
guide the interpretation of new experiences; without categorization memory is virtually useless.
5. We should remember, however, that although categories are indispensable for living, not all
categorization is necessarily linguistic.
Animals must do all the time- this is “eatable”, this is harmful- without using linguistic
categories.

Finally we should note that some semanticists and linguists use term “lexeme” or “lexical
item”- rather than word- when they want to distinguish a word as an abstraction from any of its
specific parts of speech.
For example there is some underlying notion of “runningness” in the terms “run,” “ran,”
“running,” and so on, that would be missed if we considered them to be different terms entirely.
Conclusion:
The semantic triangle of Ogden and Richards represents the word, concept and category.
A word is not simply an arrangement of letters, we all understand that words have a meaning. So
claiming that all words express concepts simply follows from the definition of what a word is, on
the other hand concepts are closely related to our knowledge of the world, and people can more
easily learn concepts that are consistent with their knowledge. Concepts are central to our
everyday thought. When we are planning for the future or thinking about our past, we think
about specific events and objects in terms of their categories.
Lastly, learning about those categories is a complex process that involves seeing exemplars.
References:
https://simplyphilosophy.org/study/words-and-concepts/
https://nobaproject.com/modules/categories-and-concepts
https://books.google.com.ph/books?
id=a0fQYPHBc4gC&pg=PA77&hl=fil&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false
https://www.thefreedictionary.com/Word+(linguistics)