“范畴化”一直语言学家和其他认知科学工作者研究的热点,原型范畴理论和基本层次范畴理论则是人们研究范畴化的两个重要理论成果。目前国内学者对前者的介绍和研究较多,对后者则研究较少。本文主要介绍了国外对基本层次范畴理论的研究成果,并初步探讨了该理论对英语词汇教学的启示。 Categorization has always been a hot spot for linguists and other cognitive scientists to study. Prototype theory and basic hierarchical theory are two important theoretical achievements in the study of categorization. At present, there are more introduction and research on the former by domestic scholars and less on the latter. This paper mainly introduces the foreign research results on the theory of the basic level category, and explores the enlightenment of the theory on English vocabulary teaching.