Stereotyping, Prototyping and Figurative use: towards a proper semantic analysis Henk J. Verkuyl ∗ Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS 1. Introduction. In this paper, I would like to discuss the notions of stereo- type and prototype from a purely semantic point of view. Amazingly, many of those writing about prototyping and prototypical effects tend to ignore stereotyp- ing, and vice-versa. 1 In general, though, one may observe that the literature on stereotyping is predominantly found in the area of social psychology, whereas prototyping plays an important role in the domain of cognitive psychology. This is at least my strong impression after searching the literature: stereotyping is an interactional matter, and it has found its way into sociolinguistics, whereas prototyping is mainly a cognitive-psychological affair extended into psycholin- guistics. 2 So, there seems to be some division of labor: stereotyping implies some social setting, prototyping seems to involve the individual way of handling conceptual categories. In spite of the popularity of the two notions, precise def- initions are not given, or if they are given they suit the purposes of social or functional psychologists, not those of linguists. In fact, the role of linguistics * I would like to thank members of the UiL OTS Lexicon Workgroup for their comments on earlier versions: Martin Everaert, Maarten Janssen, Louis des Tombe, Dirk Heylen, Ren´ ee Pohlmann and Jan van Eyck. I also would like to thank Truus Kruyt of the Instituut voor Nederlandse Lexicologie for valuable help, and Johan van Benthem and Ray Jackendoff for their comments on a previous version. I would like to thank Ferenc Kiefer for giving me the opportunity to present this material for an audience at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest and Lars Hellan for doing the same in Trondheim, Norway. 1 E.g. Fodor & Lepore (1997) in “There is a Standard Objection to the idea that concepts might be prototypes (or exemplars, or stereotypes)”, and Jackendoff (1983), when talking about Rosch’s prototypes, uses the term ‘stereotype’, even though the title of the relevant section is called ‘Default Values and Prototype Images’. In Jackendoff’s 1990-book Semantic Structures again his preference rules are associated with the term ‘stereotype’. 2 Cf. Bar-Tal (1989), Macrae et al. (1997) on the sociology side, Tversky (1977), Osherson & Smith (1981), Tsohatzidis (1990) on the psychology side. Of course, there is an evident overlap between sociological and psychological research, e.g. Hamilton (1981). And there has been a lot of attention from the philosophical side: Kripke (1972), Putnam (1975;1979); more recently Bartsch (1987a;1987b) and Leezenberg (1995), among many others.