Componential analysis

Meaning is a complex phenomenon which is difficult to analyze. As we have already suggested that the meaning of words involves its relations with reality, and the language is in some sense grounded in reality, at the same time it involves sense relations with other words in the vocabulary and the collocational relations that may hold between it and co-occurring words. A major breakthrough into the problem was the introduction of ‘componential analysis’, suggested by some semanticists and lexicographers (See Nida 1875 and Leech 1981), who discovered that meaning can be divided into a finite number of components. These minimal components of meaning are called semes, they are universal to all languages, and they are the ‘bricks’, from which the meanings of all words can be composed.

Semantic components are typically represented in opposition, e.g.: + animate vs. –animate. It means, that the meaning of any word may be composed either of the component + animate or the component

– animate. To illustrate this, consider the following words: a cow and a pear. The meaning of the former word would include the + animate component, while the meaning of the latter would include the - animate component. It becomes evident, that this +/- animate opposition serves to differentiate between two large groups of words in the vocabulary of the language. These components are of the highly general abstraction. There may be found components of a more specifying character, for example +- mammal to substitute + animate and +- fruit to substitute –animate.

Let us attempt a componential analysis of the lexeme cow. A cow is a female animal; it belongs to the class of mammals. So there can be identified at least two components of meaning: + animate and +mammal. Going further in differentiating meanings, we have to find the component to indicate that cow is the female in contrast to the bull. This component can be marked as – male. Another feature of a cow is its ‘age’ – we have to show that it is a fully grown, adult animal, in contrast to the calf. This component can be defined as + adult. So we have identified three components of the noun cow: +mammal, – male, +adult. There are some more nouns referring to adult female mammals – vixen, birch, mare, sow, doe. We need another component to distinguish cow from one of these. We suggest the word + bovine, originating from the Latin word, on analogy with +canine used for the dog.

Within a genus these components can distinguish the meaning of the closely related lexemes, e. g.:

bovine adult male

bull + + +

cow + + -

calf + - +/-

The +/- indicates that calf is not differentiated for gender. Each lexeme has the set of components to convey the meaning. They all share +bovine, which is a common component. The others serve to distinguish the meanings and are therefore differentiating components