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Coats and bras and jeans – and clothes, too: lexical contrast between hyperonyms and hyponyms1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2016

ANU KOSKELA
ANU KOSKELA*
Affiliation:
English Language, Faculty of Arts, Design and Humanities, De Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester LE1 9BH, United [email protected]
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Abstract

A special case of lexical contrast involves contrasting a hyperonym and a hyponym (as in clothes and socks), leading to the narrowing of the hyperonym's sense. However, not all hyperonym/hyponym pairs are amenable to contrast (e.g. ?animals and cats). While category prototype structure forms a strong motivating and constraining factor for hyperonym/hyponym contrast (e.g. Lehrer 1990), what is lacking in previous work is a systematic consideration of the co-hyponyms in real language use. To that end, data from the GloWbE corpus (Davies 2013) were used to investigate which terms for items of clothing (e.g. coat, bra, jeans) can be contrasted with their hyperonym (either clothes or clothing). While marginal members of the item of clothing category (e.g. belt, hat) have a stronger potential for contrasting with the hyperonym, even prototypical hyponyms (e.g. shirt, jeans) contrasted with clothes/clothing in at least some contexts. Language users can therefore manipulate category boundaries to meet their discourse needs, exploiting a range of dimensions of difference to create contrast. Many clothing terms were also found to contrast more readily with clothes than with clothing, suggesting that the meaning of clothes is generally narrower than that of its near-synonym clothing.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , November 2017 , pp. 475 - 499
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

1

I am grateful to M. Lynne Murphy and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this article. All errors and mistakes naturally remain my own.

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