Lexical Acculturation and Ethnobiology: Utilitarianism versus Intellectualism

Are folk-biological classification and naming informed by utilitarianist considerations (usefulness of plants and animals to people) or by intellectualist concerns (interest in species simply because they are there)? This question is investigated by examining the semantic content of native labels from Amerindian languages for living things introduced by Europeans to the New World. Such terms can be "utilitarian" in nature, for example, Cherokee "he carries heavy things" for horse, or "morphological" in nature, for example, Mataco "large tapir" for horse. This nomenchtural evidence indicates that the utility of living things is not an especially salient aspect of their conceptual cognition and, thus, lends support to the intellectualist argument.