A taxonomy of part-whole relations

Abstract

A taxonomy of part-whole or meronymic relations is developed to explain the ordinary English-speaker's use of the term “part of” and its cognates. The resulting classification yields six types of meronymic relations: 1. component-integral object (pedal-bike), 2. member-collection (ship-fleet), 3. portion-mass (slice-pie), 4. stuff-object (steel-car), 5. feature-activity (paying-shopping), and 6. place-area (Everglades-Florida). Meronymic relations ore further distinguished from other inclusion relations, such as spatial inclusion, and class inclusion, and from several other semantic relations: attribution, attachment, and ownership. This taxonomy is then used to explain cases of apparent intransitivity in merological syllogisms, and standard form syllogisms whose premises express different inclusion relations. The data suggest that intransitivities arise due to equivocations between different types of semantic relations. These results are then explained by means of the relation element theory which accounts for the character and behavior of semantic relations in terms of more primitive relational elements. The inferential phenomena observed are then explained by means of a single principle of element matching.