The meaning of GENERIC in linguistics (one last word for now)

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Sat, 5 Mar 2005 18:38:31 EST, RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:

>I did find two instances of "autohyponymy" through Google, one of which
>defined it as the case where "the new sense of a term is a hyponym of the
>original." I now see that this is a term of his own creation and that at
>least two other linguists have also used it since 1984. It looks like a
>useful term to me, so I'm glad he coined it and I am sure I will use it
>from now on whenever I am in need of such a word, even though this use of
><auto-> strikes me as somewhat eccentric compared to the use in, say,
>"autoerotic" or "automobile" (just a matter of taste, of course).

Those of a structuralist bent would understand what Larry describes in
terms of "markedness".  An autohyponym is the "unmarked" of two items
asymmetrically opposed in a markedness relationship.  I don't know if
Larry's 1984 piece (NELS, "Ambiguity, negation, and the London School of
Parsimony"?) relates autohyponymy to markedness, but here's something that
does:

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http://amor.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h2816i3x/LexSemantik1.pdf

An expression A is a HYPONYM (i.e. an "undername") of an expression B
iff everything that falls under B also falls under A. In this case, B is
called a HYPERONYM (i.e. an "overname"). Examples are 'dog' and
'mammal', 'apple' and 'fruit', 'refrigerator' and 'appliance', 'king'
and 'monarch', 'scarlet' and 'red', 'walk' and 'go'. [...]

It is a frequent situation that one expression can serve as its own
hyponym (so-called AUTOHYPONYMS). We often find this with names of
biological kinds, when gender is a factor. For example, 'dog' is a term
for dogs in general, but can also be used for male dogs and is then
contrasted with 'bitch'. The noun 'cow' is used for female cattle, but
also for cattle in general, whereas 'bull' is used for male cattle only.

In structuralist terms, 'dog' and 'cow' are UNMARKED, and 'bitch' and
'bull' are MARKED. The marked or unmarked status sometimes is reflected
in morphological complexity; cf. 'lion' as the unmarked expression and
'lioness' as the marked expression.

The autohyponym is often the expression that denotes the thing or
concept that is considered more typical or more frequent.
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--Ben Zimmer