term search

[bryllars at concentric.net]

Ah! -- but when terms get this arcane - and all they DO is classify
  Do we need them?  Who are we trying to mystify?

Bryllars


At 12:37 PM 10/13/01 -0400, you wrote:
>>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
>
>