2.9 Hyponyms
How many different kinds of fruit can you think of? Kinds of vegetables? Kinds of tools? Kinds of trees? Kinds of birds? Try making a list of kinds of drinks… Ready? Well, all of those kinds of drinks can be called co-hyponyms, because they are all a kind of drink; and this is what hyponymy refers to. In this example, the word drink is the superordinate term.
Sometimes, co-hyponyms can also be the superordinate term if there are different kinds of them. For instance, the word hat is a kind of clothing, such as shoe, T-shirt, dress, etc., and it is then a co-hyponym along with these other words; but it can also be a superordinate term for wide-brimmed hat, pill-box hat, straw hat, etc.
There is also the ‘a part of’ relation called meronymy. For example, while pill-box hat and wide-brimmed hat are kinds of hat, brim, crown and hatband are parts of a hat. Clearly, ‘a kind of’ and ‘a part of’ are very different types of relations between words, and both hyponymy and meronymy are very important to understand the kinds of relations between words and very useful as a vocabulary teaching-learning tool.
LAS Activity 210. Hyponyms (PORTFOLIO)
Instructions
- Observe the following chart.
- Download the following Word file ‘LAS Activity 210’ and make a similar one of your own.
- Once you finish this activity, save it as PDF, name it LAS_210_LastName_FirstName, and upload it in Eminus in the corresponding section in ‘Actividades’.
