Ever since antiquity conceptual hierarchies have been an indispensable element in western thinking on knowledge structures. They are also considered to be a central principle in the organization of lexis. The cognitive salience of the base level discovered in the last few decades has caused doubts to be raised about the dominance of logical inclusion relations in everyday language. With reference to French, Spanish, and lexical data from other languages, the study demonstrates that there are numerous linguistic features supporting the view that the structure of ordinary vocabulary is rooted in the base level rather than in logical hierarchies.

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