Questions:

1. Prove that word-meaning is not homogeneous.

2. What is grammatical meaning? How does it manifest?

3. Describe correlation between lexical and grammatical meaning.

4. What is lexico-grammatical meaning?

5. What is part-of-speech meaning?

6. Describe correlation between lexical and grammatical meaning in different parts of speech.

Semantic Structure of Words. Componential Analysis

I.V. Arnold, The English Word, §3.1. Definitions, §3.6. Componential analysis [pp. 40-42, 57-59]

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Denotative meaning. Difference between significative and demonstrative meaning.

he conceptual content of a word is expressed in its denotative meaning. To denote is to serve as a linguistic expression fora concept or as a name for an individual object. The denotative meaning may be significative if the referent is a concept, or demonstrative, if it is an individual object.The term referent or de­notatum (pi. denotata) is used in both cases. Any text will furnish examples of both types of denotative meaning. The demonstrative meaning is especially characteristic of colloquial speech where words so often serve to identify particular elements of reality. E.g.: "Do you remember what the young lady did with the telegram?" (Christie) Here the connection with reality is direct.

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Connotational meaning

specially interesting examples of significative meaning may be found in aphorisms, proverbs and other sayings rendering general ideas. E. g.: A good laugh is sunshine in the house (Thackeray) or The rea­son why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work (Frost) contain words in their significative meanings.

The information communicated by virtue of what the word refers to is often subject to complex associations originating in habitual con­texts, verbal or situational, of which the speaker and the listener are aware, they give the word its connotationalmeaning.The interaction of denotative meaning and its pragmatic counterpart — connotation — is no less complicated than in the case of lexical and grammatical meaning. The connotativecomponent is optional, and even when it is present its proportion withrespect to the logical counterpart may vary within wide limits.

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What connotational meaning conveys

e shall call connotation what the word conveys about the speaker’s attitude to the socialcircumstances and the appropriate func­tional style (slay vs kill), about his approval or disapproval of the object spoken of(clique vs group), about the speaker's emotions(mummy vs mother), or the degree of intensity(adore vs love).

The emotional overtone as part of the word's communicative value deserves special attention. Different approaches have been developing in contemporarylinguistics.

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Emotional and evaluative meaning as part of denotational meaning

he emotional and evaluative meaning of the word may be part of the denotational meaning. For example hireling ‘a person who offers his services for payment and does not care about the type of work’ has a strong derogatory and even scornful connotation, especially when the name is applied to hired soldiers. There is a considerable degree of fuzziness about the boundaries between the denotational and connotational meanings.

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Semantic components and componential analysis

he third type of semantic segmentation mentioned on p. 39 was the segmentation of the denotational meaning into semantic components. The componential analysis is a very important method of linguistic investigation and has attracted a great deal of attention. It is usually illustrated by some simple example such the words man, woman, boy, girl, all belonging to the semantic field "the human race" and differing in the characteristics of age and sex. Using the symbols HUMAN, ADULT, MALE and marking them posi­tively and negatively so that -ADULT means 'young' and -MALE means 'female', we may write the following componential definitions:

man:	+ HUMAN	+ ADULT	+ MALE
woman:	+ HUMAN	+ ADULT	— MALE
boy:	+ HUMAN	— ADULT	+ MALE
girl:	+ HUMAN	— ADULT	— MALE

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Polysemy

ne further point should be made: HUMAN, ADULT, MALE inthis analysis are not words of English or any other language: they are elements of meaning, or semeswhich can be combined in various ways with other similar elements in the meaning of different words.Nevertheless a linguist, as it has already been mentioned, cannot study any meaning devoid of form, therefore these semes are mostly deter­mined with the help of dictionary definitions.

To conclude this rough model of semantic complexities we come to the fourth point, that of polysemy.

Polysemy is inherent in the very nature of words and concepts as every object and every notion has many features and a concept re­flected in a word always contains a generalization of several traits of the object. Some of these traits or components of meaning are common with other objects. Hence the possibility of using the same name in sec­ondary nomination for objects possessing common features which are sometimes only implied in the original meaning. A word when acquir­ing new meaning or meanings may also retain, and most often retains the previous meaning.

E. g. birth — 1) the act or time of being born, 2) an origin or begin­ning, 3) descent, family.

[…]

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Implicational meanings

f the communicative value of a word contains latent possibilities realized not in this particular variant but able to create new derived meanings or words we call that implicational. The word bomb,for example, implies great power, hence the new colloquial meanings 'great success' and 'great failure', the latter being an American slang expression.

The different variants of a polysemantic word form a semantic whole due to the proximity of the referents they name and the notions they express. The formation of new meanings is often based on the potential or implicational meaning.The transitive verb drive, for instance, means ‘to force to move before one’ and hence, more generally, 'to cause an animal, a person or a thing work or move in some direction', and more specifically 'to direct a course of a vehicle or the animal which draws it, or a railway train, etc.', hence 'to convey in a vehicle' and the intran­sitive verb: 'to go in a vehicle'. There are also many other variants but we shall mention only one more, namely — the figurative — 'to mean', as in: "What can he be driving at?" (Foote)

All these different meanings can be explained one with the help of one of the others.

The typical patterns according to which different meanings are unit­ed in one polysemantic word often depend upon grammatical mean­ings and grammatical categories characteristic of the part of speech to which they belong.

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Interrelation between grammatical meanings and semantic structure

epending upon the part of speech to which the word belongs all its possible meanings become connected with a definite group of gram­matical meanings, and the latter influence the semantic struc­ture of the word so much that every part of speech possesses semantic peculiarities of its own.

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Componential analysis via proportions (commutation tests)

good deal of work being published by linguists at present and dealing with semantics has to do with componential analysis. To il­lustrate what is meant by this we have taken a simple example used for this purpose by many linguists. Consider the following set of words: man, woman, boy, girl, bull, cow. We can arrange them as cor­relations of binary oppositions man : : woman = boy : : girl = bull : : cow. The meanings of words man, boy, bull on the one hand, and woman,girl and cow, on the other, have something in common. This distinctive feature we call a semantic component or seme. In this case the semantic distinctive feature is that of sex — male or female. Another possible correlation is man : : boy = woman : : girl. The distinctive feature is that of age — adult or non-adult. If we compare this with a third cor­relation man : : bull = woman : : cow, we obtain a third distinctive fea­ture contrasting human and animal beings. In addition to the notation given on p. 41, the componential formula may be also shown by brackets. The meaning of man can be described as (male (adult (human being))), woman as (female (adult (human being))), girl as (female (non-adult (human being))), etc.

Componential analysis is thus an attempt to describe the meaning of words in terms of a universal inventory of semantic components and their possible combinations.

Componential approach to meaning has a long history in linguistics.L. Hjelmslev's commutation test deals with similar relationships and may be illustrated by proportions from which the distinctive features d₁, d₂, d₃ are obtained by means of the following procedure:

As the first relationship is that of male to female, the second, of young to adult, and the third, human to animal, the meaning 'boy' may be characterized with respect to the distinctive features d₁, d₂, d₃ as containing the semantic elements 'male', 'young', and 'human'. The existence of correlated oppositions proves that these elements are recognized by the vocabulary.

In criticizing this approach, the English linguist Prof. W. Haasargues that the commutation test looks very plausible if one has care­fully selected examples from words entering into clear-cut semantic groups, such as terms of kinship or words denoting colours. It is less satisfactory in other cases, as there is no linguistic framework by which the semantic contrasts can be limited. The commutation test, however, borrows its restrictions from philosophy.

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Hierarchial structure. Markers and distinguishers

form of componential analysis describing semantic components in terms of categories represented as a hierarchial structure so that each subsequent category is a sub-category of the previous one is described by R. S. Ginzburg. She follows the theory of the American linguists J. Katz and J. Fodor involving the analysis of dictionary meanings into semantic markers and distinguishers but redefines it in a clear-cut way. The markers refer to features which the word has in common with other lexical items, whereas a distinguisher, as the term implies, differentiates it from all other words.

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Example of analysis

e borrow from R. S. Ginzburg her analysis of the word spinster. It runs as follows: spinster — noun, count noun, human, adult, female, who has never married. Parts of speech are the most inclusive categories pointing to major classes. So we shall call this component class seme (a term used by French semasiologists). As the grammatical function is predominant when we classify a word as a count noun it seems more logical to take this feature as a subdivision of a class seme.It may, on the other hand, be taken as a marker because it represents a sub-class within nouns, marks all nouns that can be counted, and differentiates them from all uncountable nouns. Human is the next marker which refers the word spinster to a sub-category of nouns denoting human beings (man, woman, etc. vs table, flower, etc.). Adult is another marker pointing at a specific subdivision of living beings into adult and not grown-up (man, woman vs boy, girl). Female is also a marker (woman, widow vs man, widower), it represents a whole class of adult human females. 'Who has never married' — is not a marker but a dis­tinguisher, it differentiates the word spinster from other words which have other features in common (spinster vs widow, bride, etc.).

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Method of logical definition

he analysis shows that the dimensions of meaning may be regarded as semantic oppositions because the word's meaning is reduced to its contrastive elements. The segmentation is continued as far as we can have markers needed for a group of words, and stops when a unique feature is reached.

A very close resemblance to componential analysis is the method of logical definition by dividing a genus into species and species into subspecies indispensable to dictionary definitions. It is therefore but natural that lexicographic definitions lend themselves as suitable mate­rial for the analysis of lexical groups in terms of a finite set of semantic components. Consider the following definitions given in Hornby's dictionary:

cow — a full grown female of any animal of the ox family

calf — the young of the cow

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Explanatory transformation

he first definition contains all the elements we have previously obtained from proportional oppositions. The second is incomplete but we can substitute the missing elements from the previous definition. We can, consequently, agree with J. N. Karaulov and regard as semantic components (or semes) the notional words of the right hand side of a dictionary entry.

It is possible to describe parts of the vocabulary by formalizing these definitions and reducing them to some standard form according to a set of rules. The explanatory transformations thus obtained constitute an intersection of transformational and com­ponential analysis. The result of this procedure applied to collective personal nouns may be illustrated by the following.

e. g. team→ a group of people acting together in a game, piece of work, etc.

Procedures briefly outlined above proved to be very efficient for certain problems and find an ever-widening application, providing us with a deeper insight into some aspects of language.