A Cognitive-Semantic Study Of The Hyponymy

Hyponymy refers to a paradigmatic lexical sense relationship between a generalterm and a specific term. The dissertation is a systematic study of hyponymy from acognitive-semantic perspective.The hyponymy-related notion can be surveyed in philosophy, cognitive science,and linguistics. Philosophically, the hyponymy-related notion dates back to Aristotlein terms of the relationship between the species 'man' and the genus 'animal'. Thisspecies/genus inclusion is echoed in Humboldt's philosophical investigation on thevariety of human languages and the intellectual development of human beings: man isborn with the tendency to classify concepts into categories of genus and species, so asto have a logically ordered human mind.The philosophical investigation is interested in the relationship between thereference part of word meaning and what is referred to in the world, rather than thesense relations between words. The cognitive interest in hyponymy is related to thehuman cognitive pattern, by means of which human beings categorize andconceptualize the world (Rosch 1973, 1976, 1978, Berlin 1973, 1976, 1978, WordNet).The linguistic analysis of hyponymy, however, constitutes an important part of thelexical sense relations in the traditional investigation of structuralist lexical semantics,on a par with synonymy, antonymy and meronymy. Linguistically, hyponymy haslong been recognized as one of the constitutive principles in the vocabularyorganization of all languages. The hyponymy-related notion is found in Saussure(1959 [1915]) & also in Trier (1932, 1934). More recent systematic study of iexicalsemantics in more or less the same tradition can be read in Lyons (1968, 1977) onStructural Semantics, Lehrer (1974) on Semantic Fields and Lexical Structure, Cruse(1986) on Lexical Semantics, Taylor (1996) on Linguistic Categorization: Prototypesin Linguistic Theories, and Pavlicic (a 2004 Columbia University PhD Dissertation)on The Organization of Verbs in Mental Lexicon.Of all the established authors in the study of hyponymy, Lyons (1968: 453, 1977:291) is recognized as the first linguist to create the terms: 'hyponymy','superordinate' and 'hyponym'. And the notion of hyponymy as a vertical,paradigmatic relation of lexical sense that holds between a superordinate term and ahyponym and its co-hyponyms has been quickly accepted in linguistic analysis. Despite the great contributions made so far to linguistic study, there are somecontroversial issues to be clarified in the analysis of hyponymy. Firstly, there is nounanimous agreement on the direction of inclusion between the superordinate and thehyponym, i.e., whether the superordinate includes the hyponym, or vice versa.Secondly, the binary treatment of hyponymy into superordinate & hyponym termsmakes hyponymy a relative concept, as a hyponym in one hyponymy structure canbecome a superordinate in another, with the different status between various levels inthe hyponymy structure undifferentiated (or even neglected). Next, most of thehyponymy study is confined within a particular single language, without muchsystematic work done on a contrastive study between different languages. Finally,researchers seldom go beyond the lexical level in their study of hyponymy, to thehyponymy structures in supralexical contexts. The present dissertation is an attempt totackle these problems from a cognitive-semantic perspective.The dissertation is organized into four major parts: a historical survey, a literaturereview, a theoretical investigation and a linguistic data analysis. The historical surveyclarifies the definition of hyponymy & it is consequently assumed that human beingshave essentially the same universal thought or concept, which is uniquely lexicalizedin word forms in different languages. Therefore it is expected that acognitive-semantic study of hyponymy could not only characterize the paradigmaticrelations of lexical sense, but also capture the nature and structure of theinterdependence between concept and sense.The literature review is a survey of some major attempts in the study ofhyponymy in a number of disciplines, particularly structuralist approaches. Theyhave proved to be valuable in many aspects of linguistic studies, but more or lessimpracticable and not explicit enough to be applied to the study of hyponymy inlinguistic contexts. The theoretical investigation, therefore, is the development of atripartite division of hyponymy from a cognitive-semantic perspective. Thecognitively-motivated and semantically-based tripartite model of hyponymy provesto be a good mirror of the taxonomic status of human cognition, which representshow we bring order to the world by simplifying the overwhelming mass of information around us into hierarchically-organized categories.The linguistic data analysis is a test of our three-level model of hyponymy inlanguage. The case study of hyponymy basically involves various types of hyponymyconcerning nouns, verbs and adjectives. A comparative study of the English andChinese hyponymy is also conducted, which shows how different cultures makesense of the world by categorizing information in different ways. And it also showssomething about how human languages and minds work in the process. Finally, ouranalysis of hyponymy goes beyond hyponymy on the lexical level and moves on tostudy hyponymy on other structural levels.The major research findings in the present study on hyponymy can be broadlysummarized in term of the cognitive-semantic perspective in hyponymy study, thethree-level analysis of the hyponymy structure, the culture-specific preferences inhyponymy organization, and the behaviors of hyponymy in linguistic contexts.Theoretically, it is firstly assumed that the concept/word association could bedemonstrated in hyponymy, if it is studied in a cognitive-semantic perspective,incorporating our human cognitive categorization and conceptualization on the onehand, and the structuralist semantic sense relation on the other hand. Secondly, ourhyponymy triad complements the binary hyponymy in the structuralist tradition inthat it preserves the structuralist superordinate/hyponym division, and at the sametime reveals the different salience in the superordinate, hyponym and varietal levels.Practically, the tripartite hyponymy also accounts for the culture-specific preferencesin different languages, especially the Chinese speakers' preference of themonosyllabic characters and the category-marking radicals in the formation ofChinese characters. Last, the syntagmatic considerations of hyponymy (the basicallylexical sense relation) in context show that hyponymy constitutes a basic principle innot only vocabulary organization, but also discourse analysis.It is therefore proposed that future studies on hyponymy should take an integratedapproach, incorporating all the available achievements in relevant disciplinary studies.And more serious attention should also be paid to the theoretical depth and empiricaladequacy of hyponymy analysis, so that both the paradigmatic and syntagmatic aspects of lexical sense relations should be taken into our considerations in futurestudies, in order to yield a full, rather than partial, answer to the question ofhyponymy.