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On the transitivity of the part-whole relation1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

D. A. Cruse
D. A. Cruse
Affiliation:
Department of General Linguistics, University of Manchester
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Extract

The expression is part of can be used in a number of different senses. One might cite as examples:A sheep is part of a flock. A priest is part of the clergy. Changing nappies is part of being a mother.A petal is part of a flower. But one does not ask What are the parts of the clergy? or What are the parts of being a mother? as one might ask What are the parts of a flower? or What are the parts of the human body? I shall refer to the latter as ‘structural parts’, to distinguish them from the rest; it is with the relation between structural parts and their wholes that the present paper will be concerned. This relation can also be expressed by sentences of the form A flower has petals, The human body has arms, etc. (The verb have can, of course, also be used in senses irrelevant to the present discussion.) The part-whole relation, thus conceived, is generally recognized as being one of the fundamental sense-relations structuring the vocabulary of a language.

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Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , March 1979 , pp. 29 - 38
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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References

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