[Lexicog] lexical polysemy: reply to Amsler

[Peter Kirk]

On 17/04/2004 06:21, Patrick Hanks wrote:

> ...
>
> .. and somewhere in between is an _animate _entity which one owns.  If
> you abandon your dog, is it more like abandoning your wife or more
> like abandoning your car? It may be politically incorrect (but still
> true) to point out that "legal guardian" and "owner" are semantically
> quite close, especially insofar as the meaning of "abandon" is
> concerned. Anyway, is a husband the legal guardian of his wife?
> Haven't we moved on from there?
>
> Most lexical sets that I've looked at are like this: some clear
> prototypical members but no clear boundaries.  Where does this leave
> your decision tree structures?
>
> Your discussion of sense distinctions based on test criteria and your
> comments that "descriptions suffer from ambiguity which can be very
> hard to interpret" suggest that, for you, sense distinctions must
> be stipulative idealizations rather than classifications based
> on observed usage.  I.e. a given society or speech community can
> STIPULATE (legally or otherwise) that a pet belongs in the set of
> animate entities with rights to legal guardianship or whatever. Right?
>
> But then you have to have had some sort of ownership relationship with
> something before you can abandon it, don't you? If this is right, then
> cars, refrigerators, wives, children, dogs and (pet) cockroaches would
> all belong in the same lexical set in relation to "abandon" -- though
> perhaps not in relation to any other verb.  The contrast would be with
> "abandoning oneself to grief", assuming that ownership has nothing to
> do with the interpretation of the reflexive.
>

Patrick, I don't think you have this quite right. A wife can abandon her
husband just as easily as a husband his wife. Is there a distinction? A
dog can abandon its owner just as an owner can abandon their dog. Is
there a distinction? Even a pet cockroach can abandon its owner, if
allowed out of its cage. You could say that there are two different
senses, one when the subject is the owner/guardian and another when the
subject is the one owned or under guardianship, but any such distinction
breaks down in certain cases e.g. homosexual partners, who can abandon
one another but in whose relationship there is no asymmetry.

Also, surely there are some words in this semantic domain (defined
loosely) whose meaning is essentially tied up with the legal, or at
least customary, practices of a particular society. Examples include
"adopt" and "divorce", even "guardian" which has specific legal senses
which depend on a society, e.g. in the Middle Eastern culture where I
worked an unmarried woman whose parents have died has a legal guardian
(her closest male relative) whatever her age; but there is no tradition
of legal adoption.

--
Peter Kirk
peter at qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk at qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/



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