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Componential analysis is a way
proposed by the structural semanticists
to analyze word meaning. The approach
is based upon the belief that the meaning
of a word can be dissected into meaning
components, called semantic features.
Plus and minus signs are used to
indicate whether a certain semantic
feature is present or absent in the
meaning of a word, and these
feature symbols are usually written
in capitalized letters.
Man [+HUMAN,+ADULT,+MALE]
Woman[+HUMAN， +ADULT， -MALE]
Boy[+HUMAN, -ADULT, +MALE]
girl[+HUMAN,-ADULT,-MALE]
This is parallel to the way a phoneme is
analyzed into smaller components called
distinctive features.
/b/ [+PLOSIVE,+BILABIAL,+VOICED]
/P/[+PLOSIVE,+BILABIAL,-VOICED]
Componential analysis provides
an insight into the meaning of
words and a way to study the
relationships between words that
are related in meaning.
A
feature
of
“belongingness”
distinguishes to return, when it takes an
object, from to take back, We took
Junior back to the zoo might refer to
letting him visit the place again, but We
returned Junior to the zoo calls him an
inmate.
A feature “enemy”
distinguished U-boat from the
neutral submarine in the First
World War.
Predications,Arguments and Predicates
Before the analysis of sentence meaning
is discussed, two points should be made
clear.
First, the meaning of a sentence is not the
sum total of the meanings of all its
components. It cannot be worked out by
adding up all the meanings of its constituent
words.
Second, there are two aspects to
sentence meaning; grammatical
meaning, which means the
grammaticality or grammatical wellformedness of a sentence, and
semantic meaning, which is
governed by selectional restrictions.
Grammaticality is governed by the
grammatical rules of the language
while Selectional Restrictions are
constraints on the combination of
words to ensure semantic wellformedness. Some sentences which are
grammatically well-formed may not be
semantically meaningful.
For example:
*The brown concept
jumps sympathetically.
The predication analysis,
proposed by Leech, is a way
to analyze the meaning of
s e n te n ce s . A s e n t e n ce ,
composed of a subject and
predicate, is a basic unit for
grammatical relation. The
basic unit for meaning
analysis is called predication,
which is the abstraction of
the meaning of a sentence.
The grammatical form of the sentence does
not affect the semantic predication of the
sentence, therefore the following forms have
the same predication HE(JUMP):
He jumps.
He is jumping.
He will jump.
He has been jumping.
Did he jump?
Consider the three sentences The
children ate their dinner, Did the
children eat their dinner? And Eat
your dinner, children! Leaving aside
differences of tense and pronouns,
these sentences have a common
content which can be expressed in a
kind of Pidgin English: “Children eat
dinner”. It is this type of structure
which are called predication,
A predication consists of argument(s) and
predicate. An argument is a logical participant
in a predication. It is generally identical with
the nominal element (s) in a sentence. A
predicate is something that is said about an
argument or it states the logical relation linking
the arguments in a sentence.
According to the number of
arguments in a predication,
predication can be divided into oneplace predication, two-place
predication and no-place predication.
For example:
Children like sweets.
(two-place predication)：
CHILDREN, SWEET(LIKE)
John is ill.
(one-place predication)：JOHN(BE ILL)
It is hot.(no-place predication)：(BE HOT)
“It is hot.” is a meteorological utterance. It
is difficult to accept that the element
expressed by “ it” is an argument, since it
has no meaning independent of the
predicate. “it” is so predictable that one
cannot construct a question for which “it”
is an appropriate answer, therefore it is a
no-place predication:
What is hot?
* It!
The predicate is the main element in a
predication, for it includes tense, modality,
etc., determines the number and nature of
the arguments and governs the arguments.
Componential and predication analyses
together will enable us to represent the
greater part of the meaning of sentences.
My uncle
owns
This car
My uncle
owns
This car
Could be broken down into two
arguments ( or “logical
participants”), “my uncle” and
“ this car”, with a relational
element linking them (“owns”).
This linking element may be called,
following logical rather than
grammatical terminology, predicate.
Rather as subject,verb,
object, adverb, etc., are
constituents of sentences,
so argument and
predicate are constituents
of the predications
expressed by sentences.
Arguments sometimes match syntactic
elements like subject, verb and object,
and sometimes do not.
My uncle
owns
This car
One has to avoid associating the
‘predicate” in this sense with the
“predicate” of traditional grammar.
A tall woman was in front of the car
Assuming that all predications can be
divided up into arguments and
predicates, we have to ask how the
content of these units themselves can
be analyzed. The examples we have
looked at suggest that these units can
b e a n a l y z e d c o m p o n e n t i a l l y.
For example:
A tall woman:
Tall, +Human, +Adult, -male, +singular
A similar analysis, containing
features such as “ private”,
“motor”, and “vehicle”, could
be supplied for “ the car”.
Predicates, too, can be
broken down into
features. The predicate
“boiled’ ( in the
sentence Adam boiled
an egg) might be
an a ly z ed in t o th r e e
components: “cook”, “in
wa t er ” , an d “p as t ” .
“Adam boiled an egg”
entails
“ Adam cooked an egg.”
Boil: [+ cook, +in water,+ past]
a In front of b
a In front of b
But this does not go far enough. The
analysis of “ in front of “ fails to show its
relation to the locative meanings, such as
“over”, “under”, “by”, “on the left of”, etc.
For this purpose, three semantic
oppositions are needed:
Directions
Directions
Directional contrast
between “ in front
of “ and “behind”,
“over” and “under”,
etc. )
+Horizontal “horizontal”
-Horizontal “vertical”
+Lateral
-Lateral
“side-to-side”
“front-to-back”
The prepositions over, under, in
front of, behind, etc., may now be
defined:
(a) over
[
spatial]
direction
-horizontal
(b) under
[
spatial]
direction
-horizontal
(c) in front of
[
spatial]
direction
[+horizontal]
-lateral
(d) behind
[
spatial]
direction
[+horizontal]
-lateral
(e) on the left
[
spatial]
direction
[+horizontal]
+ lateral
(f) on the right
[
spatial]
direction
[+horizontal]
+ lateral
(g) beside, by
[
spatial]
+ proximate
[+horizontal]
+ lateral
1)The shell exploded by the
wing of the airplane.
2)Place the one coin by the
other.
3)The red car was parked by the
green one.
1)The shell exploded by the
wing of the airplane.
In (1), by simply means “ in spatial
proximity to”. Here “by” could include
“ o v e r ” o r “ u n d e r ” .
2) Place the one coin by the other.
In (2), the most likely sense is “ near to
on a horizontal plane”---that is,
excluding “over” and “under”.
3)The red car was parked by the
green one.
In (3) the meaning is even more
specific: it is “beside”, in contrast to
“ in front of” or “behind”.
1)The shell exploded by the
wing of the airplane.
by (1)
spatial
+ proximate
2)Place the one coin by the
other.
by (2)
[
spatial]
+proximate
+horizontal
3)The red car was parked by the
green one.
by (3)
[
spatial]
+proximate
+horizontal
+lateral
This discussion of spatial relations
has emphasized the point that
predicates, like arguments, can be
analyzed componentially. So
arguments and predicates are
comparable units: on the one hand
they are the elements of
predications, and on the other they
consist of features.
Predications
Arguments,
predicates
features
PREDICATION
Predicate
->direction
- lateral
“in front of”
Argument1
+HUMAN
+ADULT
+MALE
+SINGULAR
“ a man”
Argument 2
+HUMAN
+ADULT
-MALE
+SINGULAR
“ a woman”
The predicate is the major element in
the sense that it determines ( in ways
that will shortly be made clear ) the
number and nature of the arguments. In
the above case, the relational meaning
of “in front of” requires the presence of
two arguments which can be placed in a
spatial relationship; without them, “in
front of” would not make sense.
Three general types of predicate
are distinguished: two-place, oneplace and no-place.
It is doubtful whether there are
three- or four-place predications
because they usually turn out to be
combinations of two-place and oneplace predications.
Thus , “John gave the dog a bone” can
by analyzed as follows:
“John gave the dog a bone”
“John caused X”
“X”= “The dog received a bone”.
Entailment and Inconsistency
In predication analysis, hyponymy and
incompatibility are treated as relations
between arguments and between predicates,
rather than between word-meanings.
An entailment relation exists between two
propositions which differ only in that an
argument of one is hyponymous to an
argument of the other. For example, a is a
hyponym of b in:
(16)
a
“I saw a boy Entails “ I saw
b
a child
The hyponymy relation can also be between
predicates:
(17)
P
Q
“ Turpin stole a horse” Entails “Turpin took a horse”
The following general rules for entailment
and inconsistency may now be stated:
X entails Y if X and Y are identical except
that
1. X contains an argument a and Y
contains an argument b, and
2. a is a hyponym of b
a
b
“I saw a boy” Entails “ I saw a child”
or 1. X contains an argument a and Y
contains an argument b, and
2. b is a hyponym of a
a
“Children are a nuisance.”
b
entails
“Boys are a nuisance.”
P
Q
“ Turpin stole a horse” Entails “Turpin took a horse”
or 1. X contains a predicate P and Y
contains a predicate Q, and
2. P is a hyponym of Q
P
Mary dislikes work.
Q
Mary likes work.
X is inconsistent with Y if X and Y are
identical except that
1.X contains a predicate P and Y
contains a predicate Q
2.P is incompatible with Q
The rules of entailment and
inconsistency apply cumulatively, in
the following ways:
(A)If X entails Y and Y entails Z,
then X entails Z (i.e. entailment
is a transitive relation)
(B)If X entails Y and Y is
inconsistent with Z, then X is
inconsistent with Z.
These two supplementary rules may be
illustrated by supposing X,Y,and Z to be
the following:
(A)X: Boys ran down the street
Y: Boys went down the street
Z: Children went down the
street
(B)X: John was singing drunkenly
Y: John was singing
Z: John was silent.
Tautology arises, roughly speaking,
when information contained in an
argument of a prediction includes the
information contained in the rest of the
predication.
In a one-place predication, this
means simply that the argument is
hyponymous to the predicate:
The argument is hyponymous to the
predicate:
( a
HUMAN
ADULT
-MALE
<who.LOVE. you>
“The woman you love
:
P )
-MALE
is female”
In a two-place predication, a tautology
arises wherever a qualifying predication in
one of its arguments semantically includes
the rest of the main predication.
(a
.SELL. food )
HUMAN
MALE
<who.SELL.meat>
“ A butcher
sells
food”
These rules can be stated more precisely in
linear notation:
Rules of tautology:
a) If a is hyponymous to P, (a:P) is a
tautology:
This boy is male.
The third type of deviation, semantic
anomaly arises when one of the
arguments or the predicate of the main
predication is self-contradictory.
This orphan’s father drinks heavily.
This programme is for the
music-lover who dislikes music.
Contradiction:
Contradiction arises when the
information contained in an
argu m en t o f a p re d i ca ti o n i s
incompatible with the information
contained in the predicate.
That man is female.
In a two-place predication, a
contradiction means the qualifying
predication is inconsistent with the
rest of the main predication, e.g.
This orphan has a father.