[Lexicog] hierarchical lexical relations

[Allan Johnson]

Thinking about Wayne's question on semantic domain subcategories brings up
another question - related, but not quite the same.  We've been talking
about displaying a hierarchy of semantic domain labels, where the actual
words would show up at the bottom level.  Another kind of hierarchy I've
seen has the vernacular words or their glosses at every level, and has no
limit on how many levels can occur.  This kind of hierarchy is available
for defining lexical relations in LinguaLinks.  Two specific lexical
relations that require this functionality are generic-specific and
part-whole.

Suppose I wanted to record the following relationships:

the "body" is made up of "head", "arms", "torso", and "legs"
the "arms" are made up of "shoulder", "elbow", "wrist", "hand"
the "hand" is made up of "palm" and "fingers"

I'm trying to envision how this kind of relationship would be recorded in
Shoebox MDF.  Maybe like this, where \lf is the lexical function field and
\lv is the vernacular word that has the specified lexical function:

\lx body
  \lf part
    \lv head
  \lf part
    \lv arms
  \lf part
    \lv torso
  \lf part
    \lv legs

\lx arms
  \lf part
    \lv shoulder
  \lf part
    \lv elbow
  \lf part
    \lv wrist
  \lf part
    \lv hand
  \lf whole
    \lv body

\lx hand
  \lf part
    \lv palm
  \lf part
    \lv fingers
  \lf whole
    \lv arms

Note that this is using two kinds of \lf - "part", and "whole", where one
is sort of an inverse of the other.  All the information needed to build
the hierarchy is here, so there should be no need to come up with a label
for each level - other than perhaps the English gloss of each word when the
vernacular is another language.

As far as I know, Lexique Pro doesn't have a way of displaying the network
of words that can be linked together in this way, so maybe this would be a
good feature to request - for the part-whole relationship, and also for the
generic-specific relationship.

Allan J.



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