Words As Names For Objects, Actions, Relations, and Properties

Words as Names for Objects, Actions, Relations, and Properties
Oxford Handbooks Online

Words as Names for Objects, Actions, Relations, and
Properties
Barbara C. Malt
The Oxford Handbook of the Word
Edited by John R Taylor
Print Publication Date: Jun 2015 Subject: Linguistics, Semantics

Online Publication Date: Mar 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199641604.013.006
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter discusses how a speaker chooses words to make reference to elements of
the world. While some names, especially those at the basic level of a taxonomy, might be
privileged, the selection must reflect both the message that the speaker wants to transmit
and what the addressee is prepared to understand. Audience design considerations
include the age and knowledge base of the addressee and the typicality of the referent
with respect to word possibilities. The choice is also constrained by the options retrieved
from memory at the moment of the utterance, which are influenced by word frequency
and context. Those, in turn, are constrained by the full set available to that individual
speaker. This set is a function of both the language history and the speaker’s language
learning experiences, including effects of bilingualism on word knowledge.
Keywords: names, word choice, basic level, reference, typicality, audience design, word frequency, context,
language history, bilingualism
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17.1 Words as names

A little brown bird with a bubbly song, its perky tail upright, is found in woods and
gardens in the United States and Great Britain. What is its name? Casual observers may
call it Jenny Wren. To birders in the US, it’s House Wren. To birders in Britain, it’s just
plain Wren. But the situation is a little more complex. Jenny Wren is actually two different
species. In the US, it’s Troglodytes aedon. In Britain, it’s Troglodytes hiemalis. In the US,
both species occur, so American birders distinguish them as House Wren and Winter
Wren. In Britain, only the second is found, so it is just plain Wren. Is the only right name
for each of these birds the scientific name, then? The problem is that scientific names are
always subject to revision. As knowledge of evolutionary relations advances, species are
split or lumped, and even the genus assignment can change. There is no such thing as a
final, fixed, correct scientific species name. This situation lends a certain irony to the
quotation on the International Ornithologists’ Union’s list of preferred bird names:
‘Wisdom begins with putting the right name on a thing.’
But, of course, people use names all the time. Imagine, for instance, that you spy a
fledgling wren sitting in the dogwood tree, begging loudly for food from its parent, and
you want to tell your grandmother about it. You must choose a word not only for the bird,
but also for its begging action, for the strident property of its action, for its relation to the
tree, and for the target of its action. If there are many possible names for each thing, how
do you choose the words to convey all this information?
(p. 321) Olson (1970) provided a thought experiment for a simpler circumstance. Suppose
a gold star is placed under a small, round, white, wooden block. There might also be a
small, round, black block present. Alternatively, there could be a small, square, white
block, or there could be several—a round black one, a square black one, and a square
white one. How would you tell someone where the star is? In the first case, you might say
that it is under the white one. In the second, you might say it is under the square one, and
in the third, that it is under the round, white one. The gold star is under the same block
each time, but the utterances differ. Olson concluded that words pick out an intended
referent relative to the alternatives from which it must be differentiated. Words are
chosen to reduce alternatives or uncertainty, not because they are the name for
something.
So, returning to the wren, if you want to be understood, you must take into account the
context in which you are talking. If you are talking to your grandmother, whose
knowledge of birds is casual at best, the optimal name may be Jenny Wren. If you were to
tell her that there’s a Troglodytes aedon in the dogwood tree, her uncertainty about what
you mean would not be reduced. On the other hand, if your grandmother is an
ornithologist, then the opposite will be true. Troglodytes aedon is unambiguous. If you tell
your ornithologist grandmother you saw a Jenny Wren, she will infer that your own
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knowledge of birds is casual at best and that you might even have seen some sparrow or
finch instead of a wren.
The lesson is that objects, actions, relations, and properties do not each come with a
name that intrinsically belongs to them and uniquely identifies them. A good name is one
that successfully conveys what the speaker wanted to convey to his or her audience. A
bad name is one that doesn’t. In the rest of this discussion, we will consider two issues in
detail: first, how speakers choose among different possibilities in light of their
communication goals, and second, what determines the word options available to
speakers when they make those choices.
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17.2 Satisfying communication goals
17.2.1 What information does the speaker want to convey?
Brown (1958) provided what has become a classic discussion of how speakers choose
words. He was interested in how adults name things for children. Short names may be
viewed as suitable for young children, since they should be easiest for a child to
remember or pronounce. Still, he noted, sometimes choices do not follow this bias:
pineapple, banana, and apple are longer and harder than fruit, but an adult will still call
the fruit by its longer name. Possibly the longer names are more frequent, but that just
raises the question: why are they more frequent? Brown suggested that the names
chosen anticipate the functional structure of the child’s world. For a child who will
interact with a particular dog as a family member, the dog will be called Prince. For a
child who will interact with it only in passing as a member of a larger category, the dog
(p.
322)
will be called dog. More generally, names will be chosen to identify what the thing is
equivalent to and distinct from in its typical use. A banana is not interchangeable with a
pineapple or apple for most purposes; therefore, it won’t do to call it fruit. On the other
hand, one banana is about as good as the next, so there’s no need to differentiate them
further by name.
Brown’s notion of naming at the ‘level of usual utility’ suggested that things will tend to
have one preferred name among possibilities ranging from specific to general.
Anthropologist Brent Berlin and colleagues studied members of traditional (non-
industrialized) societies, such as those in some remote areas of central and south
America, and they found that knowledge of plants and animals could be described as
being organized in a hierarchical fashion (Berlin 1992). Members of these societies used
labels that distinguished among species of oak trees, distinguished oaks as a group from
maples or pines, distinguished trees from shrubs and vines, and so on. Despite knowledge
of relations at these many levels, the things tended to be named at a middle level for most
purposes. Psychologist Eleanor Rosch and colleagues (Rosch et al. 1976) studied
American college students in a laboratory setting and showed further that names from
the middle of a hierarchy (see Table 17.1) are special in several ways. Mid-level names
(such as chair, as opposed to kitchen chair or furniture) pick out the most inclusive
groupings of things that have similar visual properties and have many features in
common, and that people interact with in physically similar ways. Going up a level (to
furniture, for instance), things have few properties in common. Going down a level (to
rocking chair vs. kitchen chair), things have much in common but are not very distinct
from each other. Names at the middle level achieve a balance of within-category
similarities and between-category differences. Rosch et al. dubbed this the ‘basic level’,
and they found that students most often chose to name pictured objects at this level. That
is, shown a kitchen chair, they were more likely to say chair than either kitchen chair or
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furniture. In Olson’s terms, the basic level can be interpreted as the level that, for many
circumstances, reduces alternatives just as much as needed but not more so. In Brown’s
terms, the middle level is the level of usual utility.
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Table 17.1 A naming hierarchy
Superordi Furniture
nate
Basic Table Chair Lamp
Subordin Kitchen Dining Drafting Kitchen Arm chair Rocking Desk Floor Lava
ate table room table chair chair lamp lamp lamp
table
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The idea that things are preferentially named at a middle level of abstraction has been
highly influential, but it does need some qualification. For one thing, there are
circumstances where it is desirable to reduce uncertainty further. For anyone wanting to
talk about the wren that visited her garden or was seen on her bird walk, wren by itself is
not good enough if she lives where more than one species is found; she must specify
(p. 323) House Wren or another species. Further, finding utility at any particular level
depends on a certain degree of knowledge in the domain. Rosch et al. noted that not even
wren or oak was the basic level for her urban American college students (much less
House Wren or Red Oak). When shown pictures of birds or trees, they tended to say
merely bird and tree. This contrasts with members of the traditional societies studied by
the anthropologists. These groups live in close connection with the natural world, and
their everyday, basic-level terms were at a level below that of the American students.
When it comes to human-made objects, though, Western urbanites may be more likely to
be able to go down one level (e.g. sedan or convertible instead of car). In any society,
subsets of people may develop expertise in some domain that not only provides them with
more word choices at a lower level but makes groupings at this level more distinct from
one another (Rosch et al. 1976; Tanaka and Taylor 1991). The basic level and the level of
usual utility are thus to some extent flexible, depending on situational needs and
knowledge base.
But also consider Olson’s gold star under the blocks. No matter how many blocks there
are, the best you can do is say that it’s under the big, white, round, wood, slightly rough-
edged (etc.) one. There just are no more specific terms to choose from. Vocabulary for
many common objects may be somewhat limited in that respect. Malt (2013) had people
name common household objects under circumstances where each one had to be
discriminated from either several dissimilar objects or else many very similar ones. This
context manipulation altered the number of adjectives that were produced by participants
(e.g. jar vs. big blue jar; bottle vs. plastic juice bottle), but the nouns they used were the
same. Her participants had no other conventional subordinate names to use for these
ordinary containers, so they used freely composed sets of modifiers. So would most likely
all English speakers other than perhaps makers of laboratory glassware or curators of
ancient Greek container collections.
There is another complication. Students shown a picture of a kitchen chair are more
likely to say chair than either kitchen chair or furniture, but what if it were a rocking chair
that they were shown, or a beanbag chair? The name chair is most closely associated with
prototypical examples of chairs such as kitchen chairs or living room chairs. A beanbag or
rocking chair is different enough from what the addressee would normally expect upon
hearing chair that it seems insufficiently informative, maybe even deceptive, to just say
that you saw a chair. Murphy and Brownell (1985) found that when presented pictures of
objects and asked if a certain name applied to them, people were fastest to respond to
basic-level names if the objects were typical of the name (e.g. when they verified a
kitchen chair for chair). If the objects were atypical of the basic level name, people were
actually faster to respond to a more specific name (e.g. faster to respond to rocking chair
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than chair when shown the rocking chair). Geeraerts (1994) observed a similar
phenomenon in the names used for clothing items in Dutch language magazines. For
many types of clothing worn on the legs or upper body, terms similar in meaning to
English pants (in the US)/trousers (in the UK) or shirt were used. However, for blue jeans
(a kind of pants/trousers), jeans was used most often, and for t-shirts (a kind of shirt), t-
shirt was. If a basic-level word will call to mind examples different from what is meant,
that word may (p. 324) not reduce uncertainty enough, so something that better specifies
the intended referent is needed. In short, selection tends to take into account the
typicality of the intended referent with respect to that name.
One might ask whether the notion of basic level applies outside of names for concrete
objects. The case of the fledgling wren begging for food on a branch highlights that there
is much more to be named—including actions, properties, and relations. Actions, like
objects, are usually complexes of attributes. Properties like loudness or brownness, or
relations such as being on rather than in or above a branch, may be conceptually simpler.
Regardless, there is almost always more than one possible word the speaker could use in
conveying information about what she has in mind. Colours seem somewhat similar to
objects in hierarchical depth: there is the superordinate term colour and one can list
chestnut, chocolate, walnut, tan, etc. as instances of brown. Some of the subordinate
colour terms, though, tend to be restricted in their application to specific types of entity
such as hair or furniture, which creates a new dimension to this hierarchy. As far as other
elements of the sentence are concerned, the fledgling could be said to be begging,
asking, chattering, or calling for food; the begging could be loud, strident, staccato, or
persistent. However, in these cases the various alternatives may not necessarily arrange
themselves in neat hierarchical relationships. The fledgling’s noise could be framed more
abstractly as vocalizing, but there do not seem to be subordinate terms to differentiate
more finely among the forms. For the auditory quality of the vocalization, there may be
neither superordinate nor subordinate words that are relevant to it.
There has been some consideration of this issue of hierarchical depth for verbs in
particular. Dimitrova-Vulchanova and Martinez (2013) suggest that verbs for forms of
locomotion (such as walk and run) do occur within a hierarchy. For instance, go and move
can be considered superordinate to walk and run, and strut or lope could be considered
subordinates. Majid et al. (2007a) studied the verbs available in different languages to
describe ‘acts of material destruction’ such as slicing a carrot with a knife, cutting hair
with scissors, and tearing cloth by hand. Looking at four Germanic languages (Majid et al.
2007b), they noted that English has a two-level hierarchy in which, for instance, snapping
and smashing are considered forms of breaking. Swedish, in contrast, appears to be flat,
having five separate verbs that are not subordinate to any more general verbs. Brown
(2007) found that Tzeltal also had a flat structure, with many verbs for different forms of
material destruction but none functioning as superordinate to others. Based on these
pieces of evidence, names for actions may sometimes occur within hierarchies but they
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may tend to have less hierarchical depth than names for objects, and the depth may vary
from language to language.
To whatever extent object hierarchies are deeper than others, the key division may not
actually be between nouns and other parts of speech. Nouns that do not refer to concrete
objects may also tend to lack hierarchical depth. For instance, consider events like
parties or competitions. There are subordinate names for such events—birthday party,
bachelor party, or baby shower, and swim meet, canoe race, or ice dance competition—
but there may not be more abstract names that are parallel to furniture or clothing. Event
may be the best that can be found, encompassing a much wider range of entities. Nouns
that (p. 325) name abstractions such as truth and beauty may show even less depth. A
lack of hierarchical depth may also occur for other types of term. English spatial terms
such as in, on, under, above, around, and next to have no obvious subordinates or
superordinates. Terms picking out individual properties such as loud, soft, smooth, tall,
blue, and green likewise do not have obvious subordinate and superordinate names in the
sense of conventional labels (although one can always construct ad hoc phrases such as
way far under or really soft and outrageously loud to convey subordinate-level
nuances).The shallower hierarchical depth for most of these cases may be tied to lesser
property richness of the entities being labelled (how many properties can you list for
hitting or cutting or for truth or loudness, compared to a cup or a dog?), which may in
turn provide fewer bases for grouping at different levels. It is less clear, though, why
names for complex events do not encourage a deeper hierarchy.
Despite fewer choices, it may be wrong to conclude that name selection is necessarily
easier when hierarchies are shallow. Although choices among levels may be less
necessary, generating a word for something lacking a rich set of features may be more
difficult than generating one for concrete objects due to that very abstractness. Concrete
words are learned earlier by children (Gleitman et al. 2005), and age of acquisition of
words is known to influence speed of responding in tasks such as reading a word out loud
or deciding if a letter string is a real word (Cortese and Khanna 2007). It is hard to test
this prediction about relative difficulty, though, by its very nature. It is easy to show
pictures of concrete objects and have people name them; much harder to depict abstract
concepts.
All of these points so far assume that the speaker’s goal in choosing words is mainly to
pick out some entity (whether object, action, or relation) in a straightforward way.
Choices can also be influenced by communicative goals. A desire to bring attention to
some specific attributes of an object can shift the name selected. If someone folds a paper
hat out of a newspaper, how it is named later will depend on what the goal at the time is.
If the goal is to have fun with the hat, someone might say Hand me the hat; if it is to clean
up the room by recycling stuff, the person might say Hand me the newspaper (Malt and
Sloman 2007). Loftus and Palmer (1974) noted that when a car runs into another car,
calling the action bumping, hitting, or crashing conveys different images of the event. And
choice of object names can even imply an entirely different object function. A teapot can
be used as a watering can, a Frisbee as a picnic plate (Matan and Carey 2001). Calling
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the object watering can or picnic plate signals the speaker’s current perspective on the
objects. The longer the object has been used by the speaker in the new role and the more
its features are compatible with that role, the more likely it may be to consistently receive
the new name (Malt and Sloman 2007). Sometimes the choice may also convey attitude or
emotion, as, for instance, when choosing among house, hut, dump, McMansion, or palace
to name a dwelling. And sometimes the choice of name can provide feedback. If one
conversational partner has already introduced a name for an object, using that name in
return signals understanding and acceptance of the partner’s interpretation of the object
(Brennan and Clark 1996).
This last example brings up a new dimension to the question of how names are chosen. So
far, we have been looking at the issue mainly from the perspective of what the (p. 326)
speaker wants to convey. But that choice has to take into account what the addressee will
make of it. Next we consider this point more fully.
17.2.2 What is the addressee prepared to understand?
We have noted Olson’s argument that words are chosen to reduce alternatives or
uncertainty. The importance of implicit contrast sets was made more broadly by Clark
(1991). He pointed out that red is used for the colour of not only blood and fire engines
but also hair, skin, potatoes, wine, wood, and cabbage. The colour that these things
actually are (that is, the wavelengths of light reflected back to the eye) varies
substantially. The varied usages are not just because red covers a range of shades or has
fuzzy boundaries. The colour of native American skin would be called brown if seen on a
leaf. The colour of a sunburnt skin would be called pink if seen on a flower. Clark argued
that the colour name used for an object depends on the range of possibilities for that
object. This range will be mapped onto existing colour names, usually the most common
ones, so that a potato at the reddish end of potato possibilities will be red rather than
mauve or salmon. Speakers can use red in such cases because their choices, and the
interpretation by the addressee, are always made against the conceptual possibilities for
the particular domain. By the same token, several mountains may be fewer than several
crumbs, and a large mouse can be smaller than a small elephant.
In these cases, the knowledge of how an addressee might interpret the name chosen is
implicit, since for the most part people will use terms for object colours that they have
learned as conventions. Brown’s (1958) discussion illustrates how adults may more
explicitly take into account the range of conceptual possibilities to a child at different
ages. Adults may call all coins money when speaking to a small child, because at that age
all coins are equivalent as objects not to be swallowed or dropped down the heating vent.
For an older child, the adult will switch to dime vs. nickel, because the child’s range of
conceptual possibilities has become more differentiated. As Brown phrased it, parents
‘anticipate the functional structure of the child’s world’. Although the selection process in
light of the projected functional structure may still not be a fully conscious one, it does
require a dynamic assessment that allows the name to change as the child matures. In a
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related vein, Mervis (1987) noted that basic-level groupings for a child do not necessarily
match those of adults. For instance, a child may apply kitty to lions and tigers as well as
house cats, or duck to ducks, swans, and geese. Sometimes an adult may then provide
corrective feedback, pointing out how lions, tigers, and house cats are different from one
another. At times, though, the adult will choose to use a child-basic label in speech to a
child (calling a tiger a kitty), presumably on an assessment that the child is not ready to
learn more detailed discriminations.
These ways that speakers accommodate word choices to their addressees have been
labeled ‘audience design’ (Clark and Carlson 1981). Audience design effects come in
many forms. Accommodation based on the level of knowledge is not confined to adults
speaking to children. Choosing Jenny Wren vs. Troglodytes aedon (or House Wren)
(p. 327) depending on what your grandmother knows about birds would also be an
example of accommodating to addressee knowledge. Knowledge that the speaker and

addressee share can come from several sources (Clark and Marshall 1981). First is
general world knowledge. Adults share some level of knowledge of many things such as
foods, weather, animals, activities, and (depending on culture) business, politics,
computers, and TV shows. Other shared knowledge derives from community membership.
If you and your grandmother are both ornithologists, then you will share certain
knowledge relevant to ornithology. If you are both baseball fans or from Boston, you will
share other knowledge. Also, some knowledge is shared due to co-presence. If a speaker
and addressee are both in a room with an object or have been talking together about an
object, then their references to the object can proceed on the assumption that both
already know what object is being referred to. If the Porsche but not the SUV has been
under discussion, then the Porsche may be adequately picked out by the name the car
because the addressee knows which car is of current interest and the speaker knows that
the addressee knows it.
Experiments testing how speakers adjust word choice to their addressee use a
‘referential communication’ paradigm in which two people are each given cards with
pictures on them. The two sets of pictures are the same, and the task of one person (the
‘matcher’) is to line up her cards in the order specified by the other (the ‘director’). The
challenge is that the director and matcher are separated so they cannot see each other’s
cards; they can only coordinate by talking about them. Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs (1986)
tracked the referring expressions used by the partners when the pictures were complex
geometric shapes having no conventional names. They found that partners went through
a process of negotiating names for the pictures, beginning with elaborate phrases such as
looks like a person who’s ice skating, except they’re sticking two arms out in front and
converging in the end on much shorter ones such as the ice skater. The ice skater became
a suitable name for the picture based on their mutual acceptance of it, but it would not
have necessarily worked as an initial name to use with anyone else.
In fact, once a name is established between partners, they may tend to keep using the
same name even when a shorter, simpler name could be used. Brennan and Clark (1996)
showed this in a version of the task where the pictures were of ordinary objects such as
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shoes and cars. In initial trials, there were multiple instances of each category—say,
several different shoes. To pin down which card was under discussion, the partners had
to use names like penny loafer or high heels that distinguished among the shoes. In later
trials, there was only one object per category on the cards, so shoe alone would pick out
the right card. The partners continued to use the longer name previously established
between them.
Despite this evidence for attention to addressee knowledge, speakers are not always as
attentive to addressees as they might be. For example, even though a new partner would
not know which card depicts the ice skater as described above, speakers will sometimes
use the abbreviated referential terms developed with an earlier partner. Barr and Keysar
(2002) suggest this means that speakers are more egocentric than past research has
indicated. However, Horton and Gerrig (2005) argue that some of the seemingly (p. 328)
contradictory evidence on how much speakers design word choices for their audiences
depends on past experiences in particular tasks. In many situations, there is little by way
of addressee-specific accommodation that needs to be made. If a book is sitting out in
plain sight, talking about the book should work for just about any English-speaking
addressee. It may not always be self-evident when a situation requires adjusting
utterances to particular audiences. Gibbs and Van Orden (2012) note that studies
favouring the egocentric view use more complex tasks where a speaker may be easily
misled to think that certain information is shared when it is not.
17.3 What names are available to choose

among?
17.3.1 Online memory processes and name choice
One might guess that whatever possible names a person has stored in memory, these
names can all be equally well accessed and considered for use. Such a thing could be true
if the human brain were a computer and could access all relevant words in parallel,
instantaneously. The human brain is not a computer, though, and the options that become
available for use and the order in which they do are influenced by memory retrieval
processes.
In light of this fact, researchers have studied those retrieval processes. One major factor
influencing speed of word retrieval (as measured by how fast a name can be produced to
a picture of an object) is how frequent the word is (with frequency usually measured by
how often the word appears in newspapers, books, and other written material.) Lower-
frequency words are harder to produce, and it is within this lower range that frequency
level matters most. That is, higher-frequency words are easy enough to retrieve that
modest differences in frequency do not affect production much. Other variables also
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matter. As mentioned earlier, age of acquisition influences how easily a word can be
retrieved. Age of acquisition is strongly correlated with word frequency, and the effects of
both may reflect amount of experience with the words over the lifespan (Bock and Griffin
2000). Word-length effects are also part of this package, since short words tend to be
high-frequency (Zipf 1935). For current purposes, though, our main interest is not in how
fast people can produce a name for an object, but what name they choose. The results
about speed of retrieval have implications for this choice. When several possible names
for something have similar meaning but vary in retrieval ease, the name retrieved first is
more likely to be the one produced. If a speaker wants to mention an object of a certain
colour, she will be more likely to call it a blue sofa than an azure divan, even if she knows
the words azure and divan. This phenomenon also most likely feeds into the bias toward
naming at the basic level. The general utility of basic-level names results in their tending
to be short words of high frequency, which will result in their (p. 329) being more easily
retrieved than names at other levels, which in turn reinforces the pattern of being the
most frequently used.
Another factor related to frequency is typicality. Here, the issue is how typical the object
(or action, or property, or relation) is of words available. We noted before that for objects
that are typical of a word (e.g. a robin for bird or a button-down shirt for shirt), people
will tend to use the basic-level term, but if the object is atypical of the word (e.g. a
penguin or a t-shirt), they tend to use a subordinate label (penguin or t-shirt). The
explanation was that, for atypical examples, the basic-level name might not accurately
enough convey what kind of thing is being referred to. But some of this usage tendency
may also be related to the workings of memory, again in a self-reinforcing fashion. If
penguins are most often heard being called penguin rather than bird, then penguin will be
the name first retrieved and most easily produced. And of course, the more frequent
retrieval and production perpetuates it being more frequently heard.
Memory retrieval processes most likely also figure in speakers’ tendency to reuse names
in conversation. Recently heard or used chunks of language tend to be reused. For
instance, English has two different sentence structures available for describing selling
something to someone: The dealer sold the antique car to the collector and The dealer
sold the collector the antique car. Bock (1986) showed that after speakers produce the
second type of structure, they are more likely to describe a new event in a similar way.
For instance, after using the second to talk about selling the car, they are more likely to
say The girl handed the man the paintbrush even though the topics are unrelated. Malt
and Sloman (2004) found a similar tendency to re-use names recently heard. They
adapted the standard referential communication task by having the first director of each
matching session be a confederate who introduced one of two possible names for each
object (e.g. booklet vs. pamphlet, or bucket vs. pail) into the conversation. The director
role then rotated so that the original director departed, the original matcher became the
director, and a new person became the matcher. In a final round, the new matcher
became director. Whichever name was initially introduced by the confederate received
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increased use and had higher preference ratings in a post-test, even by participants who
had not heard the name from the original director. Once a name is heard in association
with an object, it is likely to become the most easily retrieved name for it, at least in the
short term, and most likely to be used again.
The idea that name choice is influenced by retrievability from memory puts a different
spin on some previously observed phenomena. The debate over whether the speaker’s
perspective is egocentric or addressee-centred in selecting names in conversation
assumes that taking someone’s perspective is part of the process. Perspective-taking may
actually be less relevant than simple retrievability of words from memory. Speech
happens quickly. English speakers produce about 150 words per minute in ordinary
discourse (Levelt 1999), and there may be a strong tendency to go with whatever name
becomes available first, regardless of whose perspective it reflects. Horton and Slaten
(2012) have recently argued that even the selective use of names in conjunction with
specific addressees can be a consequence of ordinary memory processes. Names become
encoded in memory along with the conversational partners with whom they were used,
and the partner then serves as a retrieval context that tends to cue the name that was
(p. 330) used before. The correct interpretation of name choices that show an influence of
prior conversational histories is likely to be an area of ongoing investigation.
These points about retrievability concern words considered individually—i.e. without

taking into account how other words around them may influence production. Most of
what adults say comes in phrases or sentences made up of multiple words. And words
activate other words. Hundreds (maybe thousands) of studies by now have shown priming
effects whereby activating one word facilitates processing of a related word. Seeing
doctor allows people to respond faster to nurse (e.g. judge whether nurse is word or non-
word) than seeing chair does (e.g. Neely 1991), presumably because processing doctor
causes activation of nurse before nurse even appears. This phenomenon implies that the
words needed for the early part of a sentence might influence the words retrieved and
used later in a sentence. Consistent with this idea, the effects of word frequency on
selection are reduced in sentence contexts (Griffin and Bock 1998). Words that are
predictable or most coherent in the sentence context are more easily produced. For
instance, following the sentence fragment The farmer milked the. …, the word cow can be
produced faster to a picture of a cow than the word dog can be to a picture of a dog, even
if dog is a higher frequency word. Applying this observation to how a name is chosen
among the different possibilities available, the idea is that the name used may be
influenced by words or phrases occurring shortly before. A sentence about relaxing with
the TV and a bowl of popcorn may be more likely to evoke couch, whereas one about
buying a new Oriental rug for the living room may more likely evoke sofa, even if it’s the
same object in both cases.
Page 14 of 18

17.3.2 Language histories
The cognitive processes just discussed operate over whatever candidate words a person
has stored in memory. Those options are not unlimited. Most obviously, the candidates are
determined largely by the language that the person is using. A person speaking English
will choose among English words, a person using Chinese will choose among Chinese
words. (There can also be code-mixing in which bilinguals use some words of one
language when speaking another; see Williams’ chapter, this volume.)
Although it is trivial that

the particular forms of
words will differ across
languages, what is less
obvious is that the
Click to view larger
semantic contrasts
Fig. 17.1 The English cup-glass distinction in
contrast to the Russian chashka-stakan distinction.
available in a domain can
vary by language. One of
the best-known examples is colour. People all over the world can see essentially the same
range of colours because the mechanics of colour vision are the same for everyone. Still,
languages vary in the colour terms available. English has 11 basic colour terms (red,
blue, green, and so on) and many more specific terms (maroon, turquoise, etc.). Some
languages have only five or six basic terms (generally roughly equivalent to black, white,
red, yellow, green, and blue) and some do no more than distinguish lighter from darker
colours (Hardin and Maffi 1997). The same diversity in naming patterns exists for many
other domains including household objects, body parts, spatial relations, causal relations,
acts of cutting and breaking, and acts of carrying and holding. (For illustration of many of
these domains, see Malt and Wolff 2010.) And languages (p. 331) don’t just vary in how
finely they divide up a domain by name. They can differ in how properties are used in
creating lexical contrasts. For instance, for drinking vessels, English distinguishes glass
from cup based heavily on the material, whereas Russian separates stakan (encompassing
English glasses plus plastic and paper cups) from chashka (more restricted to traditional
tea/coffee cups) based more heavily on shape (Pavlenko and Malt 2011) (see Fig. 17.1).
This phenomenon runs counter to an intuition that the world contains some inherently
separate things that everyone sees and that all languages will name in parallel ways. The
intuition is not entirely faulty. Languages do tend to make some shared lexical
distinctions reflecting what everyone sees as distinct in the world. Languages tend to
distinguish arms from hands and both from legs (Majid 2010), walking from running
(Malt et al. 2008), and red from black (e.g. Kay et al. 1997). The range of colours that get
subsumed under a single name is constrained by contiguity; languages don’t have a term
that covers red and yellow but excludes orange (Regier, Kay, and Khetarpal 2007). Still,
many degrees of freedom remain. The set of names that each speaker has at any moment
in time is not the result of people perceiving the world and dividing it up by name
according to what they see as distinct at that moment. The names were acquired from the
Page 15 of 18

generation before, and theirs from the generation before that. So naming patterns reflect
the evolutionary path of the language up to that point, developed over hundreds or
thousands of years. Just as plants and animals have radiated out in many different
directions from a shared origin, languages can follow different paths in the development
of their lexicons depending on the influences on them along the way.
One such influence is cultural history. Cultures are exposed to new objects (and maybe
new actions, such as forms of dance or interactions with technology—consider web
surfing or mouse over it) at different times in their histories. Sometimes existing names
are extended to cover the new experience, and sometimes new names are coined. Which
one happens may depend on how close the new experience seems to an old one. In many
English-speaking countries, dial telephones were widespread before similar phones with
buttons came along. English speakers extended dial as the verb for entering a phone
number to those phones and then carried it forward as new types of phone emerged, so
that it is used with the cellphones of today. Each application of the word can be thought
of as a link in a chain from the original use to its current use (Lakoff 1987; (p. 332) Malt
et al. 1999). In some developing countries, telephones were scarce until the arrival of the
cellphone. In their languages, it is less likely that the verb for entering the phone number
derives from a word for a dial.
Another influence is contact with other cultures and languages. New words can enter a
language through contact with another. Sometimes these terms fill gaps in the lexicon, as
when English adopted Yiddish klutz to label a clumsy person. (Consider also schlock,
schmooze, and mensch.) Sometimes the added terms are largely redundant vis-à-vis
existing terms, creating a situation of instability since languages tend to avoid synonymy.
If the new term catches hold (as it is likely to do if it comes from a language high in
prestige), then the old term may drop out of use, which doesn’t produce any net change
to how the domain is divided up. Sometimes both terms remain, though, in which case
they may differentiate in meaning. In English, an animal and its flesh have the same name
when it comes to chicken, fish, goat, buffalo, and some other animals, but the two are
differentiated for cattle (cow/beef), sheep (sheep/mutton), and pigs (pig/pork) (e.g. Hock
and Joseph 1996). The second of each term originated in the Romance influence on
English after the Norman invasion. This differentiation is not necessarily paralleled in
other languages lacking the imported lexical item.
More generally, the existence of one name in a semantic domain can exert an influence on
the range of applicability of others, with either expansion or contraction of ranges
possible. Even subtle differences between dialects of the same language can exist. For
instance, in British English, all long outer garments for the legs can be called trousers,
including casual ones and ones worn by women. Pants, on the other hand, is reserved for
the undergarment. In American English, trousers is reserved for a more formal garment
of a style usually worn by men. Pants covers all long outer garments for the legs including
trousers; and the undergarment is underpants. It may be more the exception than the
rule for languages to have set of words with exactly parallel meanings (see Malt and
Page 16 of 18

Majid 2013, and Majid’s chapter, this book, for further discussion of variation across
languages, and Geeraerts’ chapter for more on change over time.)
17.3.3 Individual histories
There is also individual-person variation in naming within language communities. One

source is age. Children naturally have fewer words in their vocabularies and so may
choose different names than adults do for an object. As already noted, a small child may
call a lion and tiger as well as a domestic cat kitty. Children also have lesser conceptual
grasp of the differences among things in the world, which contributes to their misuse of
words (Mervis 1987). Children may also have some biases about how words work that
cause them to name things differently from adults. Believing that different words signal
different types of thing can be useful for mapping words to things in the world, but it can
also cause young children to refuse to apply more than one word to the same thing
(Markman and Wachtel 1988). Two- to 3-year-old children who know chair or bird may
deny that a chair is also furniture and a bird is also animal.
(p. 333)Even once a child grows beyond these early factors, she may still use words
differently from adults. Ameel, Malt, and Storms (2008) studied the names that children
aged 5 and above gave to common household objects such as bottles, jars, dishes, plates,
and cups. By age 6, the children produced almost the same set of words as adults, but
they still did not use them in the same way. Some of the names were applied too broadly
and others too narrowly. It was not until age 14 that the children’s choices of names for
individual objects fully mirrored those of adults. In one sense it is surprising that it would
take children so long to work out adult naming patterns for common words applied to
simple objects. It is less surprising, though, in light of the language-specific nature of the
naming patterns that exist. Children have to figure out the details of their own language’s
pattern, which is not obvious from simple observation of similarities among the objects.
In light of the different naming patterns across languages, and how long it takes for
children to master the pattern of just one language, one might wonder how bilinguals
handle learning two different ones. There is growing evidence that bilinguals may not
acquire the equivalent of two monolingual patterns. Ameel et al. (2005) studied adult
bilinguals who had grown up in Belgium with one parent who was a native speaker of
Dutch and the other, French, and who had learned both languages from birth. They
compared the bilingual naming patterns to those produced by monolingual speakers of
Dutch and French in Belgium for the same household objects studied with children. The
monolinguals had differences in their naming patterns for these objects. The bilinguals
showed more correspondence between the naming patterns in their two languages than
the monolinguals did. That is, the bilinguals partially merged the patterns of the two
languages so that they were less distinct. At least for simultaneous acquisition, it may be
difficult or impossible to completely separate the two. Other studies have shown that
when one language is learned after another, the second language may even reshape
Page 17 of 18

naming patterns of the first (Malt et al., in press; Pavlenko and Malt 2011), at least when
the second language becomes the stronger one. Different conditions of learning and use
may result in different outcomes for bilingual word use.
17.4 Conclusion
Objects, actions, relations, properties, and other elements of the world do not each come
with a name that intrinsically belongs to them and uniquely identifies them. With every
utterance, a speaker must select among possible names for each element of a thought
that she wants to convey. This selection reflects both what the speaker wants to transmit
and what the addressee is prepared to understand. Name choice is further constrained by
the set of options retrieved from memory at the moment of the utterance. Those, in turn,
are constrained by the full set available to that individual speaker, which is a function of
both the historical development of the target language and the language-learning
experiences of the speaker. For every thought to be conveyed through language, multiple
interacting factors converge rapidly to determine word choice.
Barbara C. Malt
Barbara C. Malt, Lehigh University
Page 18 of 18

Words As Names For Objects, Actions, Relations, and Properties - 2015 - Malt

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Oxford Handbooks Online

Print Publication Date: Jun 2015 Subject: Linguistics, Semantics

Abstract and Keywords

Subscriber: El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. (COLMEX); date: 26 April 2017

17.1 Words as names

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17.2 Satisfying communication goals

17.2.1 What information does the speaker want to convey?

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Subscriber: El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. (COLMEX); date: 26 April 2017

Table 17.1 A naming hierarchy

Basic Table Chair Lamp

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Subscriber: El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. (COLMEX); date: 26 April 2017

Subscriber: El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. (COLMEX); date: 26 April 2017

Subscriber: El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. (COLMEX); date: 26 April 2017

17.2.2 What is the addressee prepared to understand?

Subscriber: El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. (COLMEX); date: 26 April 2017

example of accommodating to addressee knowledge. Knowledge that the speaker and

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17.3 What names are available to choose

17.3.1 Online memory processes and name choice

Subscriber: El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. (COLMEX); date: 26 April 2017

Subscriber: El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. (COLMEX); date: 26 April 2017

prior conversational histories is likely to be an area of ongoing investigation.

These points about retrievability concern words considered individually—i.e. without

Subscriber: El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. (COLMEX); date: 26 April 2017

17.3.2 Language histories

Although it is trivial that

Subscriber: El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. (COLMEX); date: 26 April 2017

Subscriber: El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. (COLMEX); date: 26 April 2017

17.3.3 Individual histories

There is also individual-person variation in naming within language communities. One

Subscriber: El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. (COLMEX); date: 26 April 2017

Barbara C. Malt, Lehigh University

Subscriber: El Colegio de Mexico, A.C. (COLMEX); date: 26 April 2017

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