Citing sources: Exercises

Exercise 6

Incorporate the quotation in the text at a suitable point. Decide on a suitable place to include the quotation. Make any changes necessary to the text.

Quotation

I postulate that the physical and social environment of the young child is perceived as a continuum. It does not contain any intrinsically separate 'things'. The child, in due course, is taught to impose upon this environment a kind of discriminating grid which serves to distinguish the world as being composed of a large number of separate things; each labelled with a name. This world is a representation of our language categories, not vice versa.

(E. Leach (1964). Anthropological aspects of language: Animal categories and verbal abuse. In a book of article edited by E. H. Lenneberg New directions in the study of language (pp. 23-63). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. The quote is from page 34)

Text

Anthropologists have one popular view of categorisation. According to this view, there is no basis for our category structure in the world itself. Instead this structure is imposed by categorical processes of the human mind, which in turn depend upon experiences within a particular culture. Thus the categories we use to distinguish varieties of flowers are simply those used by other members of our culture.

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