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

[Peter Kirk]

On 18/04/2004 05:39, Patrick Hanks wrote:

> 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 | ....}


Well, yes, but there is a lot more hidden in your ellipsis, including
being in an equal relationship (one homosexual partner abandoning the
other, not the meaning of "gay abandon"  :-) ), being under
responsibility (child abandoning parents - ??) and being possessed or
owned (dog or pet cockroach abandoning its owner). To me, the closest
English word would be "relationship": when two animate beings are in any
kind of relationship, one of them can abandon the other. The details are
obviously different when one party is inanimate: people can abandon
ship, but a ship cannot abandon people by floating away on the tide, as
there is no intention. (It can if the crew deliberately sail away
without the passengers, but that is metonymy.) But when people abandon
ship, they have no possession, repsonsibility or ownership, only
location, on board the ship.

>
> 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).


Agreed. We have seen with biblical Hebrew that the kinds of
classifications we want to make don't always work cleanly in practice.

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

Of course. I'm not sure where the idea came from that I was suggesting
anything different. When I mentioned the intent of the cockroach, this
is when the cockroach abandons its owner.

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



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