Is "Q-Based Narrowing" Narrowing Based on John de Lancie or Desmond Llewelyn?

[alixtii]

Literal-Minded provides (in a post from 2004) some good examples to parallel the femslash:slash relationship, in particular rooster:chicken, thumb:finger, square:rectangle, rectangle:quadrilateral, lesbian:gay (which of course is the obvious one when we're comparing to femslash:slash), and senator:congressman. (And there's an interesting meditation in the comments on whether abusers are in "abusive relationships.") languagelog only gave me microwave:oven (whose dynamic is less perfectly parallel).

And apparently there's a name for the phenomenon: Q-based narrowing. Wikipedia explains:

In semantics, Q-based narrowing is narrowing (a reduction in a word's range of meanings) that is caused by Grice's Maxim of Quantity (see Gricean maxims). Q-based narrowing occurs when a word A is a hypernym of a word B — that is, when every instance of B is an example of A. It is then common for the use of A to imply not B. For example, consider the words finger and thumb. A thumb is a kind of finger (hence the phrase ten fingers), but the term finger is not ordinarily applied to it: someone who has hurt their thumb might technically be correct in saying "I hurt my finger", but it would be misleading; the ordinary thing to say is "I hurt my thumb."

The term Q-based narrowing is due to Yale linguist Laurence Horn.

I haven't yet seen an in-depth analysis of the political implications of this phenomenon (other than ruminations on woman:man in general, a la Luce Irigaray, or Derridean deconstructions of binary thinking), but I'd like to.

Comments

[ithiliana.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, I'm not sure if I'm understanding the points--not my area of linguistics--but the way I look at slash/femslash (femmeslash, f/f/ slash, etc) is that it is similar to such constructions as:

man/woman
actor/actress
poet/poetess
doctor/lady doctor

Etc.

(But then I always struggled with those stupid ":" analogies or what they were --I always scored 99 something percentile on the verbal and word stuff in all those standardized tests, but it was because I knew what they wanted, not that it necessarily made sense a lot of the time (and my being in the 10th percentile on the math portions brought my average waaaaaaaaay down, snicker).

The thumb:finger or lesbian:gay doesn't work (for me) because I rarely rarely hear "gay" used to in the wider sense, meaning containing both lesbians and homosexual men -- gay is used in so many places and by so many to mean pretty much "homosexual men" that I cannot buy it as a true umbrella term. And since "man" is often used in place of human in the same way, I just see that as once more replicating the tendency to assign the wider/better/higher status to the male.

I mean: human is the widest term possible, with man/woman being the two gender categories, but of course in a gazillion usages "man" was used to mean human (except it really meant man in most legeal senses) that man came to share some of the 'default' universal status.

I see gay and lesbian working in the same way: I usually see those two paired with a conjunction to mean homosexual men/homosexual women.

As long as slash=male/male stories, and the "root" word has to be modified to female/female, we have the problem. I don't buy that "narrowing" is the appropriate way to describe the concept here because I don't see male/male [slash] as having a wider range of meanings than female/female [slash].

I'd prefer to see slash as meaning same-sex/erotic stories, with m/m slash and f/f slash being the two narrower categories, but I bet that isn't likely to happen.

That's why I really in some ways like "saffic" because it creates its own space, not dependent up on the male universal default for meaning (and yes, I've spent my time writing "womyn" and using all "she"s in my more radical feminist linguistic days!)

(One of my students critiqued an essay the other day as being bad because it didn't cover the history of the 1960s bra burning--I gave her two links on the internet, and told her the reason the essay on the women's movement didn't inlude bra burning is because it didn't happen!)

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

The thumb:finger or lesbian:gay doesn't work (for me) because I rarely rarely hear "gay" used to in the wider sense, meaning containing both lesbians and homosexual men -- gay is used in so many places and by so many to mean pretty much "homosexual men" that I cannot buy it as a true umbrella term.

But that's the point: none of these actually work as true umbrella terms. For all of the X:Y constructions I gave above, one can say "I rarely rarely hear 'Y' used to in the wider sense, meaning containing both X's and not-X's -- Y is used in so many places and by so many to mean pretty much 'not-X' that I cannot buy it as a true umbrella term." Just as "gay" implicitly excludes "lesbian," "rectangle" implicitly excludes "square" and "slash" implicitly excludes "femslash."

I'd prefer to see slash as meaning same-sex/erotic stories, with m/m slash and f/f slash being the two narrower categories, but I bet that isn't likely to happen.

I think it does mean that . . . sometimes. It's like in the post I linked to: roosters and hens are types of chickens, but chicken gets used to mean "not-rooster." Certainly we can talk about, I dunno, Xena and Gabrielle being "slashy." But the slippage between the two meanings of slash, of slash as m/m and slash as m/m and f/f, serves to make femslash invisible in a way which would not happen if slash had either definition uniquely. There are reasons why either option would be problematic--I've argued that even if the slippage didn't exist "slash" as an umbrella term would still be problematic because it imagines similarities between the two genres of m/m and f/f which may not exist--but the slippage itself is, I think, the worst offender by far.

[amyheartssiroc.livejournal.com]

I have nothing to add other than this is a really interesting topic.