Problems and Dilemmas Concerning the Selection and Classification of Lexical Material: The House Meronomy
Abstract
This paper presents some of the problems and dilemmas which the author was faced with in the preparatory phase of selection and classification of lexical material for the study on the semantic field of house and its parts or, more precisely, its realizations (lexical fields) in two languages, English and Serbian. The lexical fields, based on the semantic relation of meronymy (or part-whole relation) and thus also called meronomies, belong to a type of the (branching) lexical hierarchies in the two languages, having as its highest member or global holonym (that is a noun denoting the largest whole in a meronomy) the lexeme house in English and kuća in Serbian, and as its lower members, the so-called meronyms, all the English / Serbian lexemes that denote some part of this whole.
However, due to the fact that there is still no consensus on the characterization of the concepts of ′part′ and ′whole′, as well as the relation(s) between them, the problems and dilemmas concerning the selection of English and Serbian meronyms for the study were mostly related to how to interprete ‘a house taken as a whole’ and, therefore, what types of entities to consider as its parts. To be more precise, is ‘a house taken as a whole’ seen only as a (main) building (on the property area) composed of its characteristic segmental and systemic parts, e.g. a roof, walls, doors, windows, rooms, plumbing, wiring, etc., or could it be interpreted in a wider sense to also include a large variety of entities which are, due to its function, typically found in it, e.g. furnishings, appliances, dishes, etc., and/or around/close to it, e.g. outbuildings, a fence, a yard, a garden, etc.?
Furthermore, a number of problems and dilemmas related to how to organize the selected material appeared even in a case when ‘a house as a whole’ was seen only as a 3-D hollow object segmented into its structural and spatial parts. This segmentation of the house structure, moreover, showed that the initial intention of the author — that is, first, to attempt to form a hierarchy of the meronyms and, then, to present their semantic analysis in an order that would reflect their positions in the meronomy and thus the meronymic or co-meronymic ‘ties’ between them — had been quite ambitious. For, even at that point, the meronomy of a house turned out to be just basically a hierarchical structure; but taken in its entirety, it is a tangled and entwined lexical network that is a consequence not only of the very high complexity of the whole broken down, numerous ways of its division, a variety of spatial-temporal relations between it and its parts (or between the parts themselves) etc., but also of purely linguistic phenomena such as a wide denotational range of a great number of meronyms, their polysemy even in the house meronomy itself, and the relation of synonymy and/or hyponymy which many of the meronyms also enter into.References
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