What's the Real Thing? : Paradoxes and Prototypes of an English Adjective
Ulf Magnusson · 2003
In this preliminary survey of the adjective real, corpus data are used to describe its collocational properties. The meaning of real may seem to vary in a paradoxical manner, in that "real things" are sometimes those that are natural & sometimes those that are unnatural. In an attempt to reconcile its apparent inconsistencies in meaning I make a distinction between how real is used with reference to artifacts & to natural objects. Another distinction is made between whether speakers categorize objects on a prototypical or on a truth-conditional basis.