Zbornik Radova Filozofskog Fakulteta u Prištini (Jan 2012)
On meronymy
Abstract
In spite of the fact that there is a long tradition of its research, which dates from the period of ancient philosophy and which, since the 20th century, has been conducted from the perspective of several disciplines (logic/philosophy, psychology, linguistics, visual perception, artificial intelligence etc.), the relation between parts and wholes (the so-called meronymy, partonymy, or part-whole relation) still causes a lot of confusion and controversy. There is even no consensus on the interpretation of the fundamental terms ‘part’ and ‘whole’, as well as on the status and definition of their relation. While meronymy is often mentioned, along with synonymy, antonymy, and hyponymy, in lists of semantic relations among words, lexicology has traditionally paid it less attention than the other relations, as this relation is mostly regarded as a part of encyclopedic (rather than definitional) knowledge. Recent changes in approaches to meaning, however, have resulted in more attention to meronymy, and the relation is now relevant for several applied linguistic endeavors. For instance, the PART-OF relation, like the TYPE-OF relation (hyponymy) is central to the creation of dictionary definitions. Since meronymy has not yet been often considered in the linguistic literature in Serbian, this paper presents a part of theoretical considerations on this relation, mostly based on Cruse (1995; 2004a; 2004b), Croft and Cruse (2004), and Winston et al. (1987).
