Componential Analysis

Presented by Abdul Farooq Khan

Assigned bySir Asif Usmani

Department of English Language and Literature, Minhaj University Lahore.

Before modern linguistics, the meaning of a word was assumed to be unaccountable. But

semanticists have been able to show that the sense of a word can be analyzed in terms of a set

of more general sense-components (or semantic properties/features). If you consider the

meaning of the following lists of words, you can easily point out the semantic feature shared by

each group of words.

　 　 (a) Mother Woman Hen

　 　 (b) Father Man Bull

　 　 (c) Girl Boy

　 　Words in (a) share the semantic feature FEMALE, those in (b) MALE, and those in (c) YOUNG.

This shows that word meaning is analyzable.

　 　The approach that analyzes word meaning by decomposing it into its atomic features is

called componential analysis (CA). Looking at man,woman, boy and girl from different

perspectives, we can write the components of each of them.

(Source: Leech 1981: 87)

The diagram shows that the meaning of each of the four words is composed of three semantic

features: +HUMAN, +/-MALE, +/-ADULT. Another way to represent this analysis is to write a

semantic formula in which the semantic properties are represented by symbols like +ADULT, -

MALE, etc.

　 　 man: +HUMAN +ADULT +MALE

　 　 woman: +HUMAN +ADULT -MALE

　 　 boy: +HUMAN -ADULT +MALE

　 　 girl: +HUMAN -ADULT -MALE

Different from these, some words may contain more semantic properties. For example, one

sense of the word bachelor can be analyzed in terms of four semantic properties:

　 　 bachelor: +HUMAN +ADULT +MALE -MARRIED

The symbol “0” represents the neutralization of the semantic property. A son may be +ADULT

or -ADULT.

　 　The advantages of this approach to meaning analysis are obvious. Firstly, it is a

breakthrough in the formal representation of meaning. Once formally represented, meaning

components can be seen. Secondly, it reveals the impreciseness of the terminology in the

traditional approach to meaning analysis. Looking at the semantic formula

of man and womanagain you can see that it is not true that the total meaning of one word

contrasts with that of the other. It is merely in one semantic feature that the two words

contrast. When we look at the semantic formula of manand father, we find that all the

semantic features of man are included in the semantic formulae of father. Then we reach a

different conclusion from common sense in regard to the relation between man and father. Is

this contradictory? The answer is No. The obvious fact that man includesfather is derived from

the perspective of reference. Componential analysis examines the components of sense. The

more semantic features a word has, the narrower its reference is.

　 　The limitations of componential analysis are also apparent. It cannot be applied to the

analysis of all lexicons, but merely to words within the same semantic field. It is controversial

whether semantic features are universal primes of word meanings in all languages.

Nevertheless, CA is so far a most influential approach in the structural analysis of lexical

meaning