“To take an example, the [LOCATION] slot for ‘pet’ has the value ‘in the home’, while the same slot for ‘bird’ has the value ‘in the wild’. ‘Pet bird’ inherits the value from ‘pet’ rather than ‘bird’ — pet birds live in the home and not in the wild. On another attribute, however, the composite would inherit the value from ‘bird’ — for example the slot [COVERING] the most common ‘pet’ value would be ‘furry’, but ‘pet bird’ would take the value ‘feathered’ which it inherits from ‘bird’.” (Lamberts, p.146)
So, why don't we think of a pet bird as wild? Birds tend to be wild, but when we say a pet bird, we think of the habitat of pets. And if you can explain that, then why don't we think of a pet bird as furry? Pets tend to be furry, but when we say a pet bird, we think of the coat of a bird.
With “pet bird”, we think of the habitat of a pet, and the coat of a bird. Does the problem disappear if you use a different word? Let's say we borrow a word from Welsh which means “pet bird”, none of whose etymological constituents mean pet or bird: llinos. We use the word in English so that it's a new accepted loanword. Does our problem then go away?
The most obvious rejoinder is that the problem goes away only when llinos is used, but that doesn't resolve the problem as it stands for “pet bird”. Has this at least shifted the problem from one about meaning to one about grammar?
When a child learns to use the word llinos, as opposed to pet bird, does it take them longer? You don't go through a dictionary teaching kids every single word. You can point to a pencil and say “pencil”, and say “a pencil is what you write with”, but you can't do that for words like “art” or “hope” or “concept”. When you say you're going to the art shop to buy some pencils, that's understood. When you try to define art, then you get stuck; but you are still able to use it properly.
The “pet bird” problem is related to the one of how we choose which parts of a metaphor to use when applying something. If I say “her eyes are like the sun”, you don't think of her eyes as two giant thermonuclear balls of plasma. You think, perhaps, about warmth and emotional warmth, or about how sparkling they are. What you have to do is select the trait or traits which are most applicable to the current situation. What kind of process is this? Can we circumvent confusion about it in a similar way to using llinos in place of pet bird?
by Sean B. Palmer