A Taxonomy of Part-Whole Relations

A taxonomy of port-whole or meronymic relations is developed to explain the ordinary English-speaker’s use of the term “part of” and its cognates. The resulting clossificotion yields six types of meronymic relotions: 1. component-integral object (pedal-bike). 2. member-collection (ship-fleet), 3. portion-mass (slice-pie), 4. stuff-object (steel-car). 5. feature-activity (poying-shopping), and 6. place-oreo (Everglades-Florida). Meronymic relations ore further distinguished from other inclusion relations. such OS spatial inclusion, and class inclusion, and from several other semantic relotions: attribution, attachment. and ownership. This taxonomy is then used to explain cases of opporent intransitivity in merologicol syllogisms, and standard form syllogisms whose premises express different inclusion relations. The doto suggest thot intransitivities arise due to equivocations between different types of semantic relations. These results are then explained by meons of the relation element theory which accounts for the character and behavior of semantic relations in terms of more primitive relotionol elements. The inferential phenomena observed ore then explained by means of a single principle of element matching.