A SOCIAL CATEGORICAL APPROACH TO A QUESTION ABOUT LOVE

Although scholars' interest in love phenomena has continued to increas e in recent years, a common conceptual language for the study of love has not yet emerged, as is evidenced by the large number of love taxon omies and associated vocabularies that have been advocated. A promisin g avenue for the development of a common scientific vocabulary of love lies in the systematic examination of the love vocabularies of layper sons to identify what varieties of love, if any, their lexicon reflect s. Several means by which love researchers have attempted such examina tions are described and illustrated with reference to the linguistic e xpressions ''love'' and ''in love.'' These methods include direct ques tioning, autobiographical reports, inferential studies, and the protot ype approach, which introduces the probabilistic view of cognitive cat egorization structure and process to the study of love. Several of the underlying assumptions of the prototype approach are discussed and co ntrasted to those of the social categorical approach we present here. The social categorical method is described: in this approach, responde nts place persons in their actual social worlds into social categories , and the associations among the memberships of those categories are e xamined. Finally, the implications of some of the findings derived fro m this method for a taxonomy of love and for the study of interpersona l relationships are discussed.