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Vehicle is the superordinate term and car is a hyponym of it. Van, car, lorry, etc., are
co-hyponyms. Car is then, in its turn, superordinate to saloon, hatchback, coupé, etc.
Hyponymy, as is evident, is one of the major organizing principles of thesauruses. Not all
taxonomic-type relations, however, are true examples of hyponymy: partwhole relations
such as finger/hand may be termed meronymy and Lyons (1977b, pp. 293–301) points to
a variety of types of quasihyponymy, which include sets such as stroll/ amble/plod etc.
under the superordinate walk, and round/square/oblong under shape (where shape is not
of the same grammatical class as the quasi-hyponyms). Cruse (1975) argues that many
quasi-hyponymic relations in natural language cannot be explained at all in terms of
entailment and should be seen as purely conventional arrangements of phenomena in the
world. Thus watches, ties, cameras and other presents has no permanent implication that
If it is a tie, it is therefore a present (cf. If it is a rose, it is therefore a flower).
The discussion of relations between the items in sets that realize semantic fields does
not necessarily imply that all items behave in the same way. If we consider the gradable
antonyms it is clear that one term of the pair usually operates as the unmarked term, i.e.
the question How long will the meeting be? is heard as a neutral question concerning
duration: How short will the meeting be? will be heard as marked, or else can only
function where ‘brevity’ is already given in the context. Likewise How big is your house?
and How wide is the room? testify to the unmarked nature of big and wide. Among other
incompatibles, one term can often double up as gender-marked—often, but not
exclusively, male—and as gender-neutral. Lyons (1977b, p. 308) gives dog as an
example, which can be used to refer to any dog, bitch, or puppy, but which can also be
used to differentiate gender, as in the question Is it a dog or a bitch? Tiger, fox and pig
are other examples. Dog can thus be said to be simultaneously superordinate to bitch and
its co-hyponym.
SYNTAGMATIC FEATURES
So far, the discussion of lexical relations has proceeded firmly within the domain of
semantics and the types of meanings carried by paradigmatic relations. But a parallel,
vigorous line of study, dominated by British linguists, has concentrated its efforts during
the mid-late twentieth century on syntagmatic aspects of lexis. The seeds of this variety
of lexical studies are found in the work of J.R.Firth, and it is the notion of collocation
that is Firth’s principal contribution to the field.
In contrast with the decontextualized, theoretical dictionary (Leech, 1981, p. 207)
which is the construct of decomposition, componential analysis, and semantic relations,
Firth is concerned with an ‘abstraction at the syntagmatic level …not directly concerned