Abstract
This essay surveys and critically comments upon four lexicographic (semantic) descriptions offered for the English noun cup. Labov (New ways of analyzing variation in English. Georgetown University Press, Washington D.C., pp. 340–73, 1973), Katz (Philos Stud 31: 1–80, 1977), Wierzbicka (Aust J Linguistics 4: 257–281, 1984), Goddard (Semantic analysis: a practical introduction. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011), all restricted themselves to tea/coffee cups. The Oxford English Dictionary allows for other kinds of cups as well, including acorn-cups, and bra-cups. This essay offers an alternative account of what is common to the different denotata for the word cup: all but one kind are hollow hemispheroids. It speculates on the relevance of cupped hands in the sizing of cups, and finally proposes that a proper semantics for cup should be cognisant of the lexical extensions discussed here.
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Notes
- 1.
What qualifies something to become the default is its salience in the absence of any contextual motivation to prefer an alternative. Giora (2003: 34, 37) defines salience as what is foremost in the mind based on ‘such factors as familiarity, conventionality, and frequency of occurrence’. This applies to lexicon entries which comprehend as wide a range of contexts as possible; the default meaning is that one which is utilized more frequently by more people and normally with greater certitude than any alternative. Thus, default meanings are largely similar to salient meanings except that the latter, according to Giora, are foremost in the mind of an individual: ‘Salience […] is relative to an individual. What is foremost on one’s mind need not necessarily be foremost on another’s’ (Giora 2003: 37). We can distinguish between a linguist’s model of the mental lexicon as an abstraction or generalization over the hypothetical lexicon of a typical individual and the real-life internalized lexicon of particular individuals in which different meanings may be salient because of each individual’s unique experience.
- 2.
I am not suggesting that the lexical derivation went in this direction; it certainly did not.
- 3.
And therefore impermeable.
- 4.
It is interesting that by Middle Eastern tradition using the left hand when eating is tabooed, so only the cupped right hand would be acceptable in drinking. Could this influence the standard Middle Eastern cup size? Perhaps, but a similar argument fails for Chinese teacups.
- 5.
The slightly old-fashioned idiom be in one’s cups meaning “drunk” also derives from the salience of cup as a drinking vessel. Cups are rarely used for alcoholic drinks, which are normally served in glasses, (beer-)mugs, bottles, or cans.
- 6.
See Allan (2020) for many examples. There is also the conundrum that HEMISPHEROID is a more complex and rarer concept than CUP.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to three referees whose comments on earlier versions of this chapter led to many improvements. All remaining faults are mine.
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Allan, K. (2020). On Cups. In: Allan, K. (eds) Dynamics of Language Changes. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6430-7_8
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