成分分析和语义(词汇学).pptVIP

Lecture IV Componential analysis and semantic features Lead-in remark How to distinguish bicycle, motor cycle and car? Bicycle: [TWO WHEELS], [PROPELLED BY PEDALS] Motor cycle: [TWO WHEELS], [PROPELLED BY ENGINE] Car: [FOUR WHEELS], [PROPELLED BY ENGINE] Things are differentiated by their features. Words follow the same principle, i.e. different words have different meanings as they contain different features. Semantic features The linguistic meaning of a word is the set of abstracted characteristics necessary to distinguish the category which the word names from all other categories. The analysis of word-meaning is often seen as a process of breaking down the sense of a word into its minimal components. A very simple example of this is provided by the words man, woman, boy, girl, and other, related words in English. These words all belong to the semantic field ‘the human race’, and the relation between them may be appropriately represented by a two-dimensional ‘field diagram’: The diagram shows two dimensions of meaning: that of ‘sex’ and that of ‘adulthood’; a third dimension is presupposed by the isolation of the field as a whole: that between ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ species. The dimensions of meaning themselves will be termed SEMANTIC COMPONENTS or FEATURES. Another way to represent these senses is to write formulae in which the dimensions of meaning are expressed by feature symbols like HUMAN and ADULT. The meanings of the individual items can then be expressed by combinations of these features: These formulae are called the COMPONENTIAL DEFINITIONS of the items concerned: they can be regarded, in fact, as formulated dictionary definitions. The term COMPONENTIAL ANALYSIS has often been used for the method of analysis illustrated here, that of reducing a word’s meaning to its ultimate contrastive elements. It bears some resemblance to the mathematical process of factorizing a number, e.g. 10=1×2×5. A particular characteristic of componential analys