The article substantiates a shift from the traditional view of gradonymy as a lexical-semantic relation to its interpretation as a cross-linguistic syntactic category shared by English and Uzbek. Using four diagnostic criteria — a common scale, unidirectional entailment, non-substitutability and non-polarity — gradonymic relations are compared at the levels of the word form, the word, the phrase, the phraseological unit and the sentence. The study shows that gradonymy operates irrespective of the size of the unit, but is realized mainly analytically in English and through affixal, reduplicative and phraseological means in Uzbek.
Defining Gradonymy: From A Lexical-Semantic Relation to A Cross-Linguistic Syntactic Category
DOI:
Keywords:
Gradonymy
scale of gradation
syntactic category
Abstract
References
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