Des « normes catégorielles » : structuration cognitive et/ou linguistique des catégories sémantiquesDanièle Dubois , Jacques Poitou " By category is meant a number of objects that are considered equivalent. Categories are generally designated by names ". Rosch, 1978 ; p.30 Résumé : Cet article analyse ce qui est désigné, en psychologie cognitive, comme des normes catégorielles, et qu'une approche linguistique peut considérer comme des « listes de termes ». Ainsi ce « produit » d'une activité psycholinguistique particulière (l'énumération de mots isolés) peut, soit être considéré comme le « reflet » de structures catégorielles permettant d'évaluer les hypothèses psychologiques relatives aux prototypes et à la typicalité, soit comme un objet linguistique contraint par les propriétés du lexique et d'un discours très particulier (une liste). Nous tentons de montrer que les premières hypothèses doivent tenir compte des « biais » introduits par l'épaisseur du fonctionnement linguistique et que l'accès aux représentations cognitives, objectivées dans cette tâche, n'est en rien direct. Ce travail entend ainsi illustrer la nécessaire coopération disciplinaire entre linguistique et psychologie dans les sciences cognitives à condition cependant que les observables construits dans chaque discipline ne se trouvent pas réduits à un « cognitif » indéterminé.Abstract: "Categorical norms" : the cognitive and/or linguistic structuring of semantic categories . This article analyses what, in cognitive psychology, are called "categorical norms", and a linguistic approach can consider as "lists of words". Thus, this "production" of a particular psycholinguistic activity (the enumeration of isolated words) can be considered either as a "reflexion" of categorical structures, enabling the evaluation of psychological hypotheses concerning prototypes and typicality, or as a linguistic object constrained by the properties of the lexicon and a very particular sort of discourse (a list). We aim to show that the psychological hypotheses must take into account the Cnrs/ Lcpe Lyon-2

This article presents an application of the theory of prototypes to the field of inflectional morphology and especially to the treatment of exceptions. From the assumption that the handling of irregular facts is basically ruled by the same principles of categorization as the handling of regular facts, the article shows on concrete examples of German nouns - weak masculine nouns, feminine nouns with inflected e-plural and er-plural - that the principle of the motivation of inflection by other properties of lexical items (phonological, semantic, syntactic properties) also works in inflectional classes with few elements. This type of analysis leads to the hypothesis of much more complex categorial structures, which includes subcategories with very few elements, instead of the traditional dichotomy between regular and irregular or a simple continuum prototypical - non prototypical.

Knowledge of a language L provides a representational system that relates auditory patterns to conceptual structures of some sort in terms of which experience is organized. This relation requires linguistically determined structures to interact with conceptual structures in highly specific ways. The present paper argues that this interaction is to be explained by positing a level of Semantic Form SF that constitutes the interface between conceptual and linguistic knowledge. The status of SF will be discussed and some of its properties will be illustrated by means of problems arising from the interpretation of dimensional adjectives.

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