Subject: semantics MA.

Study2020
Course instructor: Asst Prof. Ahmed B. Hassan 2nd Semester
Week eight

Seminar paper on:

Componential Analysis
Prepared and to be presented by: Salim H. Ali

Contents

1. Introduction
2. Componential Analysis

2019-2020

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 1. Introduction

The meaning of the word can be broken down into a number of abstract
components or semantic features. The task of the learner is to identify those
features that will distinguish the meaning of any word from every other that
might compete for a place in the same territory. For example(boy) and (girl)
belong together because they share the feature “ human” and “non adult” and
differ only in that “girl” combines “female” with those two feature rather than
“male”. In similar way “armchair” and “sofa” have in common the features “with
aback” and “with arms” and so share territory with each other, too. They differ
mainly in the fact that “armchair” has the component “for one person” rather
than “more than one person”

This general approach to describe semantic-ally- related words has a long history
in Europe. In America: componential analysis was firstly adopted by
anthropologists, as a method of analyzing and comparing kinship terms. As a
relative simple cases, consider (maternal aunt) and (parental uncle), where what
is needed to be taken into account is the gender of the person referred to and
his/her sibling relationship with the mother or father of the speaker.
(Cowie, 2009:57-58)

Componential Analysis
One way of formalizing the sense relations that holds among lexemes is by
means of componential analysis. It was argued that some of the vocabulary of
English can be analyzed to produce a set of components which will distinguish the
meanings of all lexemes in the language. For example, the word (boy), (girl),
(man) and (woman) all denote human beings. Therefore, we can extract from
(boy) and (man) the common factor “male” and from (girl) and (woman) the
common feature “female”. As for (man) and (woman) it can be said to have as
one of their factor the “sense component” “adult”. In contrast with (boy) and
(girl), which lack “adult”. The sense of each of the four words can be represented
as the product of three factors:

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Table (1): componential analysis of (man, woman, boy and girl)

No. lexemes Human male adult

1 man + + +

2 woman + _ +
3 boy + + _

4 girl + _ _

Basic to the componential analysis approach is the assumption that

individual items can be decomposed into what are called semantic
“primes” or “primitives”. It is on the basis of those we organize the
experiential world. One of the commonest examples use by linguists is
the sets of features which are said to compose the terms”(woman,
bachelor, spinster and wife)

Table (2) : componential analysis of woman, bachelor, spinster and wife.

No lexemes features
1 woman +female +adult +human
2 bachelor +male +adult +human +unmarried
3 spinster +female +adult +human +unmarried
4 wife +female +adult +human +married
Isolating the features of these terms allows us to describe more
precisely the conceptual sense of the words which is basic to their
individual identity. It enables to define the “sense relations” more
closely.
In the case of “hyponymy”, we can see that spinster is hyponym of (woman)
because it features specification contains all features of (woman).

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 Incompatibility can also be dealt with in a similar fashion. The terms
(spinster) , (bachelor) and (wife) are all incompatible. In each case they differ from
one another in terms of one or more features, despite sharing others. So
(spinster) is incompatible with (bachelor) because of gender and with (wife)
because of marital status.

Componential analysis does not aim to capture the entire meaning of a word, it is
concerned only with “conceptual” not with “associative” meaning. The underlying
concern of componential analysis is to arrive at a universal inventory of semantic
features which are structurally present in all languages.

So the fact that (spinster) has a more negative social meaning than (bachelor) is
irrelevant here, because it has to do with the associative meaning of the words.

Table (3): componential analysis of kinship terms.

No Kinship terms male Ascend Descend linear

1 Father
2 Mother
3 Uncle
4 Aunt
5 Brother
6 Sister
7 Son
8 Daughter
9 Nephew
10 Niece
11 cousin
+ + _ +
_ + _ +
+ + _ _
_ + _ _
+ _ _ +
_ _ _ +
+ _ + +
_ _ + +
+ _ + _
_ _ + _
+/_ _ _ _

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It has been stated that the componential analysis of meaning is particularly
applicable to distinguish the meaning of lexemes that are semantically related.
This suggests that there are two broad types of semantic components:

1- Those components that serve to identify a semantic domain and are shared
by all lexemes in the domain; this type of component is sometimes called “
Common Components”
2- Those components that serve to distinguish lexemes from each other
within semantic domain; this type is termed “ diagnostic” or distinctive
feature.

From what have been presented so far, we can say that componential analysis is
very important for distinguishing sense relations. It is also important to find out
that some components are specific and some others are universal.

To summarize, we shall take stock of the assumptions implicit in an analysis of this

kind:

1- Componential analysis seeks to analyse the sense of an expression into set

of semantic components.
2- Every expression in a language should analysable into one or more
semantics components.
3- There is no one-to-one correlation between morph and semantic
components.
4- Expression that share semantic components are semantically related.
5- Being components of sense, semantic components reflect the
characteristics of prototypical denotation.
6- There is a hierarchy of semantic components, because there is a hierarchy
of categories. (Allan, 1986: 169)

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Reference

Allan, K, 1986. Linguistic meaning. USA: Routledge and Kegan Paul Inc.

Mahmood, M. AL-Sulaiman, 2010. Semantics and Pragmatics: Mosul:

Dar Ibn AL- Atheer.

Cowie, A.P., 2009. Semantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.