Summary

We have introduced three semantic relations that are important sources of entailment possibilities contributed to sentences by nouns: the has-relation, concerned with the parts that prototype members of categories have; hyponymy, which links words into hierarchies where superordinate words group together the kinds that comprise them; and incompatibility, which is the relation holding between the different (non-synonymous) hyponyms of any superordinate. Antonymy is a special case of incompatibility. It was shown that words denoting parts can themselves bear has-relations to their own parts, that they can be superordinates to their own hyponyms, and that hyponyms “inherit” parts from their superordinates. The distinction between count nouns and mass nouns was explained as a way of portraying the world. Labelling with a mass noun treats what is referred to as homogeneous substance, and therefore as not having distinct parts. Though they do not enter the has-relation, mass nouns can figure in hyponymy and incompatibility just as count nouns do. it will be seen that there is a similar distinction in verbs to the count-versus-mass distinction in nouns