General Purpose Semantics: Hyponymy and Generic Relationships

Abstract

The paper examines the concept of semantic subordination in terminology and lexical semantics. Although the two traditions differ in their view of language, their inventories of semantic relations are very similar. It is shown that the defining characteristics of the generic relationships from the principles of terminology correspond to most of the salient features of contrast sets. It is argued that the onomasiological dictionaries constitute a valuable collection of data on the semantic relationships in the general language. Examples are given fromDansk Begrebsordbog. It is claimed that the registration of contrast sets is one step towards an operational definition of word sense.