Hypernymy and hyponymy

In linguistics, semantics, general semantics, and ontologies, hyponymy (from Ancient Greek ὑπό (hupó) 'under' and ὄνυμα (ónuma) 'name') shows the relationship between a generic term (hypernym) and a specific instance of it (hyponym).

A hyponym is a word or phrase whose semantic field is more specific than its hypernym.

Like nouns, hypernyms in verbs are words that refer to a broad category of actions.

A word can be both a hypernym and a hyponym: for example purple is a hyponym of color but itself is a hypernym of the broad spectrum of shades of purple between the range of crimson and violet.

[9] Under the relations of hyponymy and incompatibility, taxonomic hierarchical structures too can be formed.

[10] If the hypernym Z consists of hyponyms X and Y, then X and Y are identified as co-hyponyms (cohyponyms), also known as coordinate terms.

The term "autohyponym" was coined by linguist Laurence R. Horn in a 1984 paper, Ambiguity, negation, and the London School of Parsimony.

[a][14] Horn called this "licensed polysemy", but found that autohyponyms also formed even when there is no other hyponym.

The form hypernym interprets the -o- of hyponym as a part of hypo, such as in hypertension and hypotension.

[15] Hyperonymy is used, for instance, by John Lyons, who does not mention hypernymy and prefers superordination.

[16] The nominalization hyperonymy is rarely used, because the neutral term to refer to the relationship is hypernymy.

Hyponymy is the most frequently encoded relation among synsets used in lexical databases such as WordNet.

This would be difficult, because abstract information (such as the speakers' relative ages) is often not available during machine translation.