Dimensions and Qualities Involved in Human Recognition of a Category: Insights from a Semantic/Pragmatic Analysis of Japanese Hontou-no (“Real”/“true”)

The Japanese hontou-no (“real”/“true”) has a unique role in selecting a certain set of members of a category, which are distinguished from stereotypes, prototypes, exemplars, and those selected by English real. This paper investigates the meaning and usage of hontou-no based on a qualitative analysis of corpus data, with a view to gaining new insights on human recognition of a category from psychological and philosophical perspectives.