[Lexicog] the abandoner: ownership? responsibility? possession?

[Patrick Hanks]

John & Peter -

Yes indeed. I stand corrected. The BNC is full of thieves abandoning stolen cars, so of course "ownership" is not the right word.  "Possession" might be a better shot than "responsibility", though. Or, better still, some broader semantic value that cannot be fully and correctly represented by any single English word. Computationally, such values might be represented as open-ended clusters of prototypical words, e.g.: {possession | responsibility | ownership | ....}

Anyway, my point remains that the semantics of the lexical sets around a lexicographic target word -- the lexical sets by which some of us try to do disambiguation of polysemous words -- merge gradually into one another, so the sort of decision procedures that Bob Amsler wants, though fine in theory, are reliant on idealizations that don't map very well onto actual usage. (But maybe better than nothing, if we can only get the theory right).

BTW, Peter - surely intent is a property of the abandoner, not the abandonee. 


Patrick


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: John Roberts 
  To: lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com 
  Sent: Saturday, April 17, 2004 10:55 PM
  Subject: Re: [Lexicog] lexical polysemy: reply to Amsler


  Patrick Hanks wrote:

  But then you have to have had some sort of ownership relationship with something before you can abandon it, don't you? 

  -----------

  The key sense of 'abandon' is "relinquish responsibility for" not "relinquish ownership of" isn't it? If you abandon your car on the motorway you don't cease to own it (technically) but you do cease to be responsible for it. The leader of a group of people could abandon them on the trail but he doesn't own them. On the other hand, it seems odd to say "He abandoned his book (i.e. the book that he owned) in the library."

  John Roberts




------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Yahoo! Groups Links

    a.. To visit your group on the web, go to:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lexicographylist/
      
    b.. To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
    lexicographylist-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com
      
    c.. Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service. 


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lexicography/attachments/20040418/ab76cdc8/attachment.htm>