MUSING EVEN MORE ON LEXICAL THEMES

Calling the kettle black... okay, so where do I go from there? To how the fluent English spoken by a Spanish-bred person "on the street" differs from that of one born in the Anglosphere? To René Magritte's pipe and apple, and from there, to the signifier vs. signified dichotomy? To semes and sememes?

AUTOHYPONYMY, VERTICAL POLYSEMY, OR Q-BASED NARROWING is a feature of the English language that still baffles me in our days.

It's when a word itself is its own hyponym, depending of context. The cases referring to living beings and their anatomy below particularly puzzled me, since, having been born and raised in Spain, I grew up solely with the term being used for the hypernym, the so-called general sense, (not as a hyponym, for which there existed another, more scientific word, in Spanish) due to Linnean taxonomy being the most prominent influence on the "street-Spanish" (as opposed to "science-Spanish", in fact, both contexts use the same words)

To disambiguate, philologists usually number the words, using 1 for the hypernym or general sense and 2 for the hyponym or specific sense (by the way, each one of the senses of the word is known as an allosemon). Which I think is rather smart, not to get mixed up with both meanings.

It's such a shame that the words can't be numbered in everyday contexts...

I will never get this feature of the English language...

EXAMPLES

SHAPES

rectangle 1 (every quadrilateral with four ninety-degree angles)

rectangle 2 (every NON-EQUILATERAL quadrilateral with four ninety-degree angles)

LIVING ORGANISMS

fingers 1 (all digits of primates)

fingers 2 (NOT all digits of primates, opposable thumbs EXCLUDED)

animals 1 (whole kingdom Animalia, or all fauna)

animals 2 (ONLY TERRESTRIAL FAUNA: mammals and reptiles)

plants 1 (whole plant kingdom, or all flora)

plants 2 (ONLY HERBACEOUS FLORA: herbs, flowers, and vegetables)

Every case when the generic name of a species overlaps with the name of gender, for instance:

cow 1 (cattle, Bos primigenius taurus, regardless of gender)

cow 2 (ONLY ADULT FEMALE cattle or Bos primigenius taurus)

OBJECTS

shoes 1 (footwear in general)

shoes 2 (LOW footwear that COVERS THE WHOLE FOOT)

COLOURS

purple 1

purple 2 (a DARK shade, not mauve, not lilac, et cetera)

etc. (the list of colour autohyponyms is endless)

VERBS

close 1

close 2 (SOFTLY, AND WITHOUT LOCKING THE DOOR)

drink 1 (swallow any liquid)

drink 2 (swallow any ETHYLIC liquid)

etc.

Yet you can't number the words constantly for an ever-confused and baffled foreigner to realize which sense of the word is being used. Which means these words above are vague.

We have got the words, the pictures (both of which are signifiers), and the concepts (signified).

Plus, we can kick up a storm of questions that lean on the philosophical:

Is this a (smoking) pipe, or not?

Is this a picture of a (smoking), pipe or not?

Is this the word/lexeme/morpheme "pipe",  p-i-p-e, or not?

Is this a water pipe, or not?

Is this a penis ("dick" is "pipe" in French), or not?

 As word senses are here defined as contextually construed units of meaning, their autonomy is considered independently from their conventionality. 

As Horn points out, autohyponymy is very idiosyncratic historically.