Peter T. Daniels scripsit:

> Under a Prototype Semantics approach, birds and fish aren't too animal-y
> at all. Only in the rather artificial environment "animal, vegetable, or
> mineral?" are you forced to include them within the word.

Prototypicality is not the same as fuzziness. "Animal" is +prototypical and
+fuzzy, but "bird" is +prototypical and -fuzzy (there are more and less
prototypical birds, but the notions "sort of a bird", "technically a bird", etc.
are not useful).

> It's _technical_ contexts where all are "Animalia."

Of course, sometimes folk taxonomies are less fuzzy than technical ones:

I well remember the reprimand I received from a New England
shipmate when I applied the informal scientific term "clam"
to all bivalved mollusks (to him a clam is only the steamer,
_Mya arenaria_): "A quahog is a quahog, a clam is a clam,
and a scallop is a scallop."
--Stephen Jay Gould, _The Panda's Thumb_

--
John Cowan jcowan@...
http://www.reutershealth.com http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
Humpty Dump Dublin squeaks through his norse
Humpty Dump Dublin hath a horrible vorse
But for all his kinks English / And his irismanx brogues
Humpty Dump Dublin's grandada of all rogues. --Cousin James