Hyperonymie

Hyperonymie, known in English as hypernymy, is a semantic relation in linguistics in which a word or category with a broad meaning subsumes a more specific term. If X is a hypernym of Y, then Y is a hyponym of X, and every instance of Y is also an instance of X. The relation is asymmetric and forms hierarchical structures such as taxonomies and ontologies.

Examples include animal as a hypernym of dog and vehicle as a hypernym of car. More generally, furniture is a hypernym of sofa. These relations help organize lexicons and knowledge representations by general-to-specific ordering, supporting reasoning about class inclusion and inheritance of properties.

Etymology: from Greek hyper over and onoma name, reflecting the idea of a broader class naming a larger category. Hypernymy is central to lexical databases like WordNet, where lexical senses are linked by hypernymy chains (dog is a hyponym of canid, which is a hyponym of mammal).

In natural language processing, hypernymy supports word sense disambiguation, information retrieval, document classification, and semantic search. It is often explored in corpora using pattern-based cues such as such as, including, or other expressions that signal a general term for listed instances.

Limitations include domain dependence, polysemy, and non-strict hierarchies; terms may have multiple hypernyms or bridging relations, and cross-language variation can affect how hypernymy is realized in different languages.