Thursday, September 14, 2023

George Yule on Hyponymous Relations and How It Applies to Greek (Linguistics)

Back in 2012, I felt the same way about this subject as I do now. My ideas about employing hyponymy and cognitive semantics to advance the study of Greek and Latin are stuck in the inchoate stage partly because I get distracted by other subjects or activities, including work.

Linguistically, hyponymy may refer to a specific kind of relationship obtains between particular signifiers. By "signifier," I mean a word's sound, graphic form or imagistic representation, which is distinguished from its semanticity. George Yule provides a diagram of hyponymous relations in his book The Study of Language (page 119). I will somewhat simplify and rework his diagram below:
Animate entities
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animal plant human
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dog tree man
Hyponymous relations are arranged hierarchically. Interpreted psychologically and pedagogically, this means that Greek would be taught in a way that's easy to retain and apprehend, in a manner that would allow a student to organize data according to conceptual hierarchies. Cognitive semantics is a related concept that I will not discuss now, but the thoughts in this post need to be developed and revised. Hopefully, writing them down and posting my reflections will assist me in that endeavor. I've already edited some things that I wrote back in 2012.

4 comments:

Terence said...

The hyponyms of "Colour" (or, Color for you Americans ;)) could be Red, Green,Blue, Purple.
The Hyponyms of Purple could be: Crimson, Violet, Lavender.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyponymy_and_hypernymy

Could you provide a similarly crude example in Greek or Latin?

Thanks

Edgar Foster said...

Arbor, the Latin word for tree, could provide lots of examples: acacia hybryda, fraxina nigra, quercus velutina.

I sometimes miss hearing Glaswegian and fondly remember the good old British conventions like whilst and words like cannae. I still use outwith on occasion 😃

Terence said...

The land of Irn-bru and wearing T-shirts in the winter! 😝

Edgar Foster said...

Yes indeed! :-)