1) One could say something like, “Beagles, such as Fido, are known to...” There your four-word phrase is part of a larger construction and is subject to the rules and constraints involved in such a construction.
2) You’re correct about “is-a”. Back in the days of symbolic AI, “ISA” was often used as an arc label in semantic network constructions. “Dog,” “pony,” and “cat,” would be linked to, say, “beast” by the ISA arc, “beast,” “fish,” and “insect” would be lined to “plant” by the ISA arc, etc. So, you’re right, it’s a device for moving up and down paradigmatic trees, as linguists would call them. Such trees are ubiquitous.
That’s why that particular construction interests me. And the fact the movement along ISA chains is syntactically easy going in one direction, but not the other direction (though there are ways of doing it and contexts in which it is natural), is therefore interesting as well. Given that we are, after all, talking about computation, the way you have to move around some conceptual structure in the course of computing over/with it, that tells us something about how the mechanism works.
Two comments:
1) One could say something like, “Beagles, such as Fido, are known to...” There your four-word phrase is part of a larger construction and is subject to the rules and constraints involved in such a construction.
2) You’re correct about “is-a”. Back in the days of symbolic AI, “ISA” was often used as an arc label in semantic network constructions. “Dog,” “pony,” and “cat,” would be linked to, say, “beast” by the ISA arc, “beast,” “fish,” and “insect” would be lined to “plant” by the ISA arc, etc. So, you’re right, it’s a device for moving up and down paradigmatic trees, as linguists would call them. Such trees are ubiquitous.
That’s why that particular construction interests me. And the fact the movement along ISA chains is syntactically easy going in one direction, but not the other direction (though there are ways of doing it and contexts in which it is natural), is therefore interesting as well. Given that we are, after all, talking about computation, the way you have to move around some conceptual structure in the course of computing over/with it, that tells us something about how the mechanism works.