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Resumo

Folk botanical life‐form terms are added to languages in a highly regular manner. The first life‐form to be lexically encoded is always 'tree'and the second, a small herbaceous plant class (GRERB). The addition of 'bush,' 'vine,' and 'grass' follows with 'vine' always preceding 'grass.' An explanation of this encoding sequence is proposed which refers to certain general principles of naming‐behavior recently outlined by Witkowski and Brown (1977). In addition, size of folk botanical life‐form vocabularies is positively correlated with both societal complexity and botanical species diversity. An explanation of these associations is presented. [cognitive anthropology, ethnobotany, folk classification, language universale, language change]

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