Associative relations and instrumentality in causality

Paul Sambre & Cornelia Wermuth
Table of contents

Conceptual relations are “meaningful associations between two or more concepts, entities or sets of entities” (Khoo and Na 2006, 158). Terminological investigations into relations between concepts traditionally result in a trichotomy of conceptual relations specified as equivalent, hierarchical and associative. This classification is based on a logical criterion, in line with the pre-constructivist, realist ontology of Wüster’s time conception (Budin 2003, 75–76). Equivalent relations connect variants of terms (due to full logical overlap, often leading to a preferred term, next to a list of pseudo- and quasi-synonyms, in thesauri); hierarchical (also called static, vertical or snap) relations build connections between broader and narrower terms (the latter being logically included in the former, as in static terminological relations, and generally differentiated as generic links between type-instance or hypernym-hyponym on the one hand and so-called meronymic, partitive or whole-part relations on the other). Hierarchical relations, which are based on the Aristotelian intensional and partitive definition formats, are well described in detailed studies on concept systems and the (logical, set-theoretical) nature of generic and part-whole relations such as in thesauri or medical ontologies (Dahlberg 1978; Felber 2001, 61–65). In Wüster’s (1974) view, associative (also called horizontal, dynamic or span) relations, are considered secondary, as a residual ontological category that brings together two or more logically non-overlapping terms or concepts, situated in different temporal or locative zones. Given the fact that, traditionally, associative relations were defined negatively (Milstead 2001, 61) with respect to the two first types, as a single category wastebasket for marking all kinds of contiguity relations (Brdar-Szabó and Brdar 2004, 327; Maroto and Alcina 2009, 240), these relations have so far been less studied both from a theoretical-linguistic (Hebenstreit 2009, 15–16) and from a descriptive or terminographic perspective (Rogers 2005, 1852; Sager 1990, 53), even in concrete domains of application such as technology and medicine (Bodenreider, Aubry, and Burgun 2005, 91). This state of affairs is due to the priority given to taxonomic classifications in the study of lexicology and terminology, necessary to the corresponding standardization of lexical sub-classes on the one hand and to the impracticality of reducing associative relations to a limited set of semantic principles on the other. In contrast to static relations, associative relations cover indeed a potentially open array of semantic relations, where dynamicity and sequentiality of links between concepts may imply and integrate very different temporal, spatial, causal and other dimensions (Wright 1997, 90) based on the conceptual dissociated character of terms mentioned before and which is reflected in syntagmatic relations between terms. In the domains of terminology, general ontology and specific knowledge representations (Green, Bean, and Myang 2002, ix–x), the entire array of associative relationships has not actually been fully described and therefore we do not yet have a finite, uniform and complete list of associative relations, despite the fact that corpus studies on specialized language use convincingly show the limited pervasiveness of vertical relations with respect to horizontal ones in specialized corpora (Faber 2005; Faber et al. 2006). So importantly, authentic language use by experts does not only deal with ways of representing unitary concepts or objects as bounded regions or states alone, but also reflects the multidimensional nature of concepts, including also the many functions concepts fulfil, the ways in which they are used, the effects of their usage, as well as the ways in which concepts may be transformed (Grenon and Smith 2004; Smith 2012; Smith and Grenon 2004). The following example illustrates this co-occurrence of snap and span relations:

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