autoholonymy
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English
Etymology
By surface analysis, auto- + holonymy, or, by surface analysis, autoholonym + -y.
Noun
autoholonymy (uncountable)
- (semantics, linguistics) The semantic relation between senses of a word such that one sense is holonymous to another.
- Hypernyms: polysemy, < colexification
- Coordinate term: automeronymy
- 2000, D. Alan Cruse, “6: Contextual variability of word meaning”, in Meaning in Language: An Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics (Oxford Textbooks in Linguistics), Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 111:
- Automeronymy occurs in a parallel way to autohyponymy, except that the more specific reading denotes subpart rather than a subtype, although it is by no means always easy to determine whether we should be talking about automeronymy or autoholonymy, that is to say, it is not easy to see which is the more basic use. An example of this may be door, which can refer to either the whole set-up, with jambs, lintel, threshold, hinges, and the leaf panel itself, as in Go through that door, or just the leaf, as in Take the door off its hinges. […] 6.4.1.4 Autoholonymy / As was mentioned above, discriminating automeronymy from autoholonymy is not easy, because there seem often to be different default readings in different contexts, that is to say, different contexts, which in themselves appear to exert no particular selective pressure, none the less induce different readings. Consider the case of body, as in Jane loves to show off her body. This surely denotes the whole body, not just the trunk (even though a lot of what Jane presumably enjoys displaying is actually part of the trunk!). But consider She received some serious injuries/blows to the body. Here, just the trunk is indicated. Another similar example is arm: a scratch on the arm is definitely on the non-hand part of the arm, but in He lost an arm in the accident, or She was waving her arms about, the whole arm is indicated. We shall tentatively consider these to be cases of autoholonymy, on the grounds that the inclusion of the hand in the latter cases is pragmatically entailed in those contexts, whereas the exclusion of the hand in the former case is totally unmotivated (admittedly, the case of body is not quite so clear). There are clearer cases in other languages, for instance, the well-known Have you eaten rice? in, for instance, Malay, as a way of enquiring whether someone has had a meal (which would prototypically include rice as a part).