Predicting conjunction typicalities by component typicalities

One of the central questions about conceptual combinations is what happens to constituent concepts that are combined into a complex concept. Different types of conceptual combinations have been distinguished: adjective– noun combinations, such as sour wine (see, e. In adjective–noun and noun– noun combinations, a considerable ambiguity may be present, in that a variety of relations can be implied. Ocean boat, ocean drive, and ocean book, for instance, all activate different relations between the head noun and the modi-fier of the compound (Murphy, 1988; Wisniewski, 1997). Relative clause descriptions of the form X's that are also Y's differ from noun–noun and adjective–noun combinations in that this sort of conceptual combination implies a clear type of relation between the complex concept and its constituents—namely, a which are also relation. Although the majority of conceptual combinations are nonintersective (e.g., an expert repair is not the intersection of the classes of experts and repairs), our interest lies in the extent to which even explicitly intersective conceptual combinations may show systematic, unexpected patterns according to a simple logical conjunction. For this reason, we concentrate on relative clause descriptions of conjunctions, such as athletes that are also drug users. Anytime multiple classifications are made, a complex concept of the relative clause type is implied. argued that any hypothesis that combines typicalities 1 of the constituent concepts according to a simple function, called simple functional hypotheses , must fail to predict typicalities for the conjunction. The argument, presented as part of a general critique of the prototype view on concept representation, has received considerable attention in the literature (for details, see, Osherson and Smith based their claim mainly on counterexamples and on intuitive examples. For example, they argued that, since wine gradually becomes vinegar if exposed to air, there must exist a sample S that is an equally good example of wine and of vinegar. When considering the conjunctive concepts sour wine and sour vinegar, S seems intuitively to be a better example of sour wine than of sour vinegar. This, however, cannot be explained with any simple functional hypothesis, since the typicality of S for sour is invariant in the two combinations and S was chosen precisely to have an equal typicality in wine and 677 In two studies, we investigated to what extent typicalities in conjunctive concepts phrased as relative clauses—such as pets that are also birds—can be predicted from simple functions of constituent …