[Lexicog] lexical polysemy: reply to Amsler

[Patrick Hanks]

Woops -- somehow, my reply to Bob Amsler became detached.  Here it is: 

Hello Bob - 

Long time no see!  Hope you are well. 

> how would you describe the constraints on <X>

Well, I would deny there are constraints. In my corpus analysis work I see plenty of preferences but no constraints. 

> I would guess that if <X> is a human being for whom one is a legal guardian, then there would be a different sense than if <X> is an inanimate entity which one owns. 

.. 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.

Friendly greetings,


Patrick
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lexicography/attachments/20040417/a9d15d4a/attachment.htm>