Use the following two groups of sentences as examples to illustrate how to use super-ordinates and subordinates. （a） There was a fine rocking-chair that his father used to sit in a desk where he wrote letters, a nest of small tables and a dark bookcase. Now all this furniture was to be sold, and with it his own past. （b） 1） Trees surround the water near our summer place. 2） Old elms surround the lake near our summer cabin.
In reading comprehension, coherence by hyponymy is an important key. In(a), the writer uses a set of hyponyms under the super-ordinate furniture, which gives the writing coherence and provides the key to understanding the text. In production, knowing the semantic features of the hyponyms and their surbordinates can help us achieve vividness, exactness, and concreteness. In (b), it is not difficult to judge that sentence 2 is better than sentence 1, for in sentence 2 the writer uses subordinates, which are concrete and precise, whereas in sentence 1 the words used are super-ordinates, which convey only a general and vague idea.
