Interactive lexis: prominence and paradigms 207the apparent irreversibility of hyponymous realizations; (15) is typical,
(16) is odd:
15 A: d’you drink WHISky
B: i’m afraid I don’t TOUCH spirits at ALL
16 A: d’you drink WHISky
B: i’m afraid I don’t LIKE bourbon
This is explained by the fact that whereas the hyponym entails the superordinate,
the reverse is rarely true. Generally speaking this is so, and superordinates
(and more especially the class of general noun) operate cohesively within
and over speaker turns to encapsulate previous items:
17 A: we DON’T seem to have very much WOOD
B: YES THAT’S a POINT YES M
C: well i supPOSE if we went into the PARK we MIGHT collect a
few STICKS but it’s NOT quite like having LOGS IS it......
D: BACK in the MIDlands we would KNOW if you KNOW
WHERE we could GO and GET all these things from but
(Crystal and Davy 1969:29:1141–8)
Wood is specifically relexicalized (prominently) as sticks and logs and then
both are encapsulated in the inclusion-relationship realized by non-prominent
things. This follows the entailment principles, though it is not inconceivable
that a second speaker might project an assumption that sticks and wood are
equivalent in a situation where sticks (and not logs) were the only obvious
or appropriate kind of wood for the job:
18 A: we NEED some WOOD for the FIRE
B: well there ARE some DRY sticks HERE
An example of this reverse entailment, which is really a projection of discourse
equivalence between the semantic superordinate and its hyponym, is the following:
19 C: but I had TROUBLE GETting my PApers i eVENtually got a
work permit after about a FIVE month deLAY
(146:1060–1)
Here the ‘papers’ in question are projected as being discourse equivalent to
the work permit. Papers is understood by the participants to be a usable
term to refer to documents enabling the speaker to work in the USA.
What is to be included in a term, or what needs specifying, will be
situation-bound and prominence choices will reflect speakers’ projections
of mutual understanding of the situation. Indeed all these discourse-bound
lexical relations are concerned with ‘use’ rather than ‘meaning’. It is thus
more appropriate, perhaps, to look at the ‘usefulness’ of items in any discourse;
the relational terms offered here (equivalence, contrast and inclusion) are
intended to reflect just such a dimension.