Meronymic structures for names denoting parts of living beings in English

Nastassia Kuzmenka

Minsk State Linguistic University

Abstract

The paper focuses on the part-whole type of lexical relations and the problem of part-whole (meronymic) hierarchies in the English lexicon. Taking into account the well-known statement that the classification of living beings serves as a model for all natural classifications, an attempt is made to construct and compare the hierarchies reflecting the part-whole relations between human body part, animal part and plant part terms in English. By means of the analysis of dictionary definitions 112 meronyms (nouns with the semantic component ‘part’ as the key word of the definition) have been revealed. The meronyms obtained form peculiar hierarchies with different lengths and numbers of branches. The detailed comparative analysis of the hierarchies shows that the human body is divided in the most detailed way. As for other living beings, – function and utility are the main parameters according to which animal or plant parts are marked out and labelled. The study of human, animal and plant part lexemes reveals the correlation between the specific configurations of the hierarchies they form and their semantic domain.

Schlagworte:

holonym, meronym, meronymic hierarchy, holo-meronymic structure, part-whole relations, holonim, meronim