ENGLISH LEXICOLOGY
"To have another language is to possess a second soul..."
Charlemagne
7.3 Sense Categories: Hyponymy
The third kind of semantic relation is hyponymy, a relation of inclusion. “A hyponym is a word whose meaning is included, or entailed, in the meaning of a more general word” (Denham & Lobeck, 2010, p.298). Hyponymy may be explained as the relation between specific and general lexemes and phrases; for example, house is a hyponym of building. Georgios Tserdanelis and Wai Yi Peggy Wong view this relation as “the loss of specificity” (2004, p.225). It indicates moving from specific (a rose, tulip, and petunia) to general (flower). The relationship between the lexemes can be seen in the diagram:
Flower and plant are super-ordinate terms, or hypernyms. Flower is the hypernym for crocus, rose, begonia, and daffodil, and it is also a hyponym of plant. Flower is superior to crocus, rose, begonia, and daffodil, but flower is inferior to plant at the same time.
It should be noted that not all lexemes have hypernyms; for example, nightclub or balloon may not have hypernyms other than vague names such as a place and a thing. Sometimes, it is difficult to assign hypernyms to abstract nouns.
Like other semantic relations, hyponymy can be subdivided into two subtypes: taxonomic and functional (Miller, 1998b, as cited in Murphy, p. 219). Taxonomies are classification systems. Taxonomic relation can be illustrated in the following example: cow is in a taxonomic relation to animal, but cow is in a functional relation to livestock (a cow functions as livestock). However, functional relation is not necessarily a logical relation because not every cow is livestock, and not every knife is a weapon.