The following is a pre-print version of a paper that has been published as: Górska, Elżbieta. 2002. “The level of specificity of part terms and their function and usage”. In Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Barbara and Kamila Turewicz (eds.). Cognitive Linguistics Today. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang (2002a), 501-515. If you want to quote from it verbatim, please check the published version. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Elżbieta Górska University of Warsaw THE LEVEL OF SPECIFICITY OF PART TERMS AND THEIR FUNCTION AND USAGE 1. Introduction In terms of Cognitive Grammar, 1 the level of specificity at which a conceived situation is characterized, or, as Langacker also refers to it, the level of schematicity, provides basis for organizing part terms into hierarchies as in (1): (1) part > car part > wiper > windscreen wiper. In such a hierarchy, each expression is schematic for the one that follows, which is said to elaborate, or instantiate it, “in the sense of providing a finer-grained characterization” (Langacker 1995:157). The present article will focus on the left-hand side of such hierarchies, i.e. on schematic part terms, or partitives. Naturally, having a highly abstract conceptual content, partitives differ greatly from specific part terms in their communicative function, and, consequently, in the range of context in which they are employed. The differences between these two types of expressions become especially clear when we consider the role of specific part terms in the conceptualization of categories which belong to the so-called basic level. Therefore, I will begin the discussion with a brief characterization of the basic level, and some of its properties which directly follow from the fundamental role of parts and part-attributes (section 2). Section 3, in turn, will focus on functions which English partitives perform in different contexts of language use. It will be argued that various properties of the overall class of partitives in English, and of selected partitives taken individually are by no means accidental. 2. Specific part terms and the basic level categories So far, the fundamental role of specific part terms in conceptual organization has been most clearly demonstrated in the studies of the so called basic level, i.e. the middle level of abstraction, 1 For the theory of Cognitive Grammar see, in particular, Langacker (1987, 1991, 2000) and the literature cited therein; see also Górska (2000).