alixtii | Is "Q-Based Narrowing" Narrowing Based on John de Lancie or Desmond Llewelyn? (Reply)

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.