term search

[Ronald Kephart]

>1) Is there a specific term for terms that serve both as terms for a
>genre and terms for members of that same genre (e.g., "man" when
>used to refer to both male homo sapiens and all homo sapiens)?

Christian,

The terms you're looking for, I think, are hypernym and hyponym, and
the hierarchical relationship is called hyponymy. In the case you
cite "man" is both a hypernym (the generic or superordinate term) and
a hyponym (a member of the category).

Of course, as I'm sure you are aware, the status of "man" as a
genuine hypernym in this particular domain is up for debate. It's use
as such was dictated by prescriptivist grammarians a couple of
centuries back, not by natural language usage (likewise for allegedly
generic "he" as a pronoun, the avoidance of negative concord
(so-called "double negatives"), and so on.

Ron

Ronald Kephart
Associate Professor & Coordinator
Program in Foreign Languages
Dept. of English & Foreign Languages
University of North Florida