Method of semantic differential
Distributional analysis
Distributive analysis - a method of linguistic research in which the classification of language units and the study of their properties are carried out solely on the basis of the distribution (distribution) of the units under consideration in the speech stream, i.e. on the basis of their compatibility with other units, which are called the environment, or context , of the units under consideration.
For example, in the sentence The boy — home the missing word is easily identified as a verb — The boy went, came, ran, etc. home. Thus, we see that the component of meaning that is distributionally identified is actually the part-of-speech meaning but not the individual lexical meaning of the word under analysis.
It is also observed that in a number of cases words have different lexi-cal meanings in different distributional patterns. Compare, e.g., the lexical meaning of the verb to treat in the following: to treat somebody well, kindly, etc. — ‘to act or behave towards’ where the verb is followed by a noun + an adverb and to treat somebody to ice-cream, champagne, etc. — ‘to supply with food, drink, entertainment, etc. at one’s own expence’ where the verb is followed by a noun+the preposition to + another noun.
It should also be noted that not only words in word-groups but also whole wordgroups may acquire a certain denotational meaning due to certain distributional pattern to which this particular meaning is habitually attached. For example, habitually the word preceding ago denotes a certain period of time (an hour, a month, a century, etc. ago) and the whole word-group denotes a certain temporal unit. In this particular distributional pat-tern any word is bound to acquire an additional lexical meaning of a cer-tain period of time, e.g. a grief ago (E. Cummings), three cigarettes ago (A. Christie)
Distributional meaning of the lexical units accounts for the possibility of making up and understanding a lexical item that has never been heard or used before but whose distributional pat-tern is familiar to the speaker and the hearer. Thus, though such words as kissable, hypermagical, smiler (She is a charming smiler), etc. cannot be found in any dictionary their meaning is easily understood on the analogy with other words having the same distributional pattern, e. g- (v + -able- -> A as in readable, eatable and kissable)
It was pointed out above that as a rule distribution of stems in a com-pound word p r e d i c t s a certain component of meaning as the stem that stands first is understood as modifying the one that follows (cf. bird-cage and cage-bird). In certain cases, however, the meaning or to be more exact one of the word-meanings may be structured differently. Firstly, in morphologically non-motivated words distributional structure is not corre-lated with certain meaning. For instance, in the words apple-sauce, plum-sauce, etc. we actually see that the item sauce-is modified by the stems ap-ple-, plum-, etc., hence these words may be semantically interpreted as ‘kind of sauce made of apples, plums, etc.’ One of the meanings of the word apple-sauce — ‘nonsense’, ‘insincere
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All in all, by the term d i s t r i b u t i o n we understand t h e a p t n e s s of a w o r d in o n e of i t s m e a n i n g s to c o l l o c a t e or t o c o - o c c u r w i t h a c e r t a i n group, or c e r t a i n g r o u p s of w o r d s h a v i n g s o m e c o m m o n s e m a n t i c c o m p o n e n t .
the analysis of lexical collocability in word-groups is widely applied for different purposes: to find out typical, most commonly used colloca-tions in modern English, to investigate the possibility / impossibility of certain types of meaning in certain types of collocations, and so on.
In the English language, e.g., the verb to seize may be combined with nouns denoting different kinds of emotions: I was seised with joy, grief, etc., whereas in the Russian language one can say на меня напала тоска, отчаяние, сомнение, etc. but the collocations напала радость, надежда are impossible, that is to say the Russian verb cannot be combined with nouns denoting pleasurable emotions. The results of the cooccurrence or distributional analysis may be of great help to teachers in preparation of teaching material.
Transformational analysis
Transformational analysis in lexicological investigations may be defined as re-patterning of various distributional structures in order to discover difference or sameness of meaning of practically iden-tical distributional patterns.
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For example, if we compare two compound words dogfight and dog-cart, we shall see that the distributional pattern of stems is identical and may be represented as n+n. The meaning of these words broadly speaking is also similar as the first of the stems modifies, describes, the second and we understand these compounds as ‘a kind of fight’ and ‘a kind of cart’ respectively. a dogfight is semantically equivalent to ‘a fight between dogs’, whereas a dogcart is not ‘a cart between dogs’ but ‘a cart drawn by dogs’.
Word-groups of identical distributional structure when re-patterned al-so show that the semantic relationship between words and consequently the meaning of word-groups may be different. For example, in the word-groups consisting of a possessive pronoun followed by a noun, e.g. his car, his failure, his arrest, his goodness, etc., the relationship between his and the following nouns is in each instant different which can be demonstrated by means of transformational procedures.
his car (pen, table, etc.) may be re-patterned into he has a car (a pen, a table, etc.) or in a more generalised form may be represented as A possesses B.
his failure (mistake, attempt, etc.) may be represented as he failed (was mistaken, attempted) or A performs В which is impossible in the case of his car (pen, table, etc.).
his arrest (imprisonment, embarrassment, etc.) may be re-patterned into he was arrested (imprisoned and embarrassed, etc.) or A is the goal of the action B.
his goodness (kindness, modesty, etc.) may be represented as he is good (kind, modest, etc.) or В is the quality of A
transformational procedure may be used as one of the criteria enabling us to decide which of the two words in a conversion pair is the derived member.
Transformational analysis may also be described as a kind of translation. There exist at least three types of translation
Interlingual translation or translation from one language into another which is what we traditionally call translation;
2. intersemiotic translation of a verbal sign by a non-verbal sign ( flag- some image, music)
3. intralingual trans-lation which consists essentially in rewording a message within the same language — a kind of paraphrasing. Thus, e.g., the same message may be transmitted by the following his work is excellent -> his excellent work -> the excellence of his work.
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The rules of transformational analysis, however, are rather strict and should not be identified with paraphrasing in the usual sense of the term. transformational procedures commonly used in lexicological investigation. These are as follows
1. permutation —lexical units and the stems of the notional words are essentially the same: cf. his work is excellent -> his excellent work -> the excellence of his work -> he works excellently.
2. replacement —replacement of a notional verb by an auxiliary or a link verb, etc. He will make a bad mistake, He will make a good teacher, the verb to make can be substituted for by become or be only in the second sentence (he will become, be a good teacher) but not in the first (*he will become a bad mistake) In other words the fact of the impossibility of identical transformations of distributionally identical structures is a formal proof of the difference in their meaning.
3. additiоn (or expansion) — may be illustrated by the application of the procedure of addition to the classification of adjectives into two groups — adjectives denoting inherent and non-inherent properties. For example, if to the two sentences John is happy (popular, etc.) and John is tall (clever, etc.) we add, say, in Moscow, we shall see that *John is tall (clever, etc.) in Moscow is utterly nonsensical, whereas John is happy (popular, etc.) in Moscow is a well-formed sentence. Evidently this may be accounted for by the difference in the meaning of adjectives denoting inherent (tall, clever, etc.) and non-inherent (happy, popular, etc.) prop-erties.
4. deletion — a procedure which shows whether the seman-tic relations between words are identical. For example, the word- group red flowers may be deleted and transformed into flowers without making the sentence nonsensical. Cf.: I love red flowers, I love flowers, whereas I hate red tape cannot be transformed into I hate tape or I hate red.1
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Transformational procedures may be of use in practical classroom teaching as they bring to light the so-called sentence paradigm or to be more exact different ways in which the same message may be worded in modern English.
Componental analysis
In this analysis linguists proceed from the assumption that the smallest units of meaning are sememes (or semes) and that sememes and lexemes (or lexical items) are usually not in one-to-one but in one-to-many correspondence. For example, in the lexical item woman several components of meaning or sememes may be singled out and namely ‘human’, ‘female’, ‘adult’. This one-to-many correspondence may be represented as follows.
The analysis of the word girl would also yield the sememes ‘human’ and ‘female’, but instead of the sememe ‘adult’ we shall find the sememe ‘young’ distinguishing the meaning of the word woman from that of girl.
componental analysis deals with individu-al meanings. Different meanings of polysemantic words have different componental structure. For example, the comparison of two meanings of the noun boy (1. a male child up to the age of 17 or 18 and 2. a male serv-ant (any age) esp. in African and Asian countries) reveals that though both of them contain the semantic components ‘human’ and ‘male’ the compo-nent ‘young’ which is part of one meaning is not to be found in the other. As a rule when we discuss the analysis of word-meaning we imply the basic meaning of the word under consideration.
it is assumed that any item can be described in terms of categories arranged in a hierarchical way; that is a subsequent category is a subcategory of the previous catego-ry.
The componental analysis of the word, e.g., spinster : noun, count-noun, human, adult, female, who has never married. Noun of course is the part of speech, meaning the most inclusive category; count-noun is a marker, it represents a subclass within nouns and refers to the semantic feature which the word spinster has in common with all other countable nouns , human is also a marker which refers the word spinster to a subcategory of countable nouns, i.e. to nouns denoting human beings; adult is another marker pointing at a specific subdivision of human beings into adults & young or not grown up. The word spinster pos-sesses still another marker — female — which it shares with such words as woman, widow, mother, etc., and which represents a subclass of adult fe-males. At last comes the distinguisher who has never married which dif-ferentiates the meaning of the word from other words which have all other common semantic features. Thus, the componental analysis may be repre-sented as a hierarchical structure with several subcategories each of which stands in relation of subordination to the preceding subclass of semantic features.
Componental analysis is also used in the investigation of the semantic structure of synonyms. There is always a certain component of meaning which makes one member of the synonymic set different from any other member of the same set. Thus, though brave, courageous, fearless, auda-cious, etc. are all of them traditionally cited as making up a set of syno-nymic words, each member of the set has a component of meaning not to be found in any other member of this set. In a number of cases this seman-tic component may be hard to define, nevertheless intuitively it is felt by all native speakers.
Componental analysis is currently combined with other linguistic pro-cedures used for the investigation of meaning. For example, contrastive analysis supplemented by componental analysis yields very good results as one can clearly see the lack of one-to-one correspondence not only be-tween the semantic structure of correlated words (the number and types of meaning) but also the difference in the seemingly identical and correlated meanings of contrasted words.
For example, the correlated meanings of the Russian word толстый and the English words thick, stout, buxom though they all denote broadly speaking the same property (of great or specified depth between opposite surfaces) are not semantically identical because the Russian word тол-стый is used to describe both humans and objects indiscriminately (cf., толстая женщина, (книга), the English adjective thick does not contain the semantic component human. Conversely stout in this meaning does not contain the component object (cf. a thick book but a stout man). The English adjective buxom possesses in addition to human the sex compo-nent, and namely, female which is not to be found in either the English stout or in the Russian толстый. It can be inferred from the above that this analysis into the components animate / inanimate, human male / fe-male reveals the difference in the comparable meanings of correlated words of two different languages — Russian and English — and also the difference in the meaning of synonyms within the English language.
Method of semantic differential
All the methods of semantic analysis dis-cussed above are aimed mainly or exclusive-ly at the investigation of the denotational component of the lexical mean-ing.
The analysis of the differences of the connotational meaning is very hard since the nuances are often slight, difficult to grasp and do not yield themselves to objective investigation and verification.
An attempt to establish and display these differences was developed by a group of American psycholinguists.1 They set up a technique known as the semantic differential by means of which, as they claim, meaning can be measured. It is perfectly clear, however, that what semantic differential measures is not word-meaning in any of accepted senses of the term but the connotational component of meaning or to be more exact the emotive charge.
Their technique requires the subjects to judge a series of concepts with respect to a set of bipolar (antonymic) adjective scales. For example, a concept like horse is to be rated as to the degree to which it is good or bad, fast or slow, strong or weak, etc.
The meaning of the seven divisions is, taking as an example the first of the scales represented above, from left to right: extremely good, quite good, slightly good, neither good nor bad (or equally good and bad) slight-ly bad, quite bad, extremely bad.
In the diagram above horse is described as neither good nor bad, ex-tremely fast, quite strong, slightly hard, equally happy and sad.
It may be argued that the data with which they deal in these investiga-tions are essentially subjective. Objectivity, however, concerns the role of the observer. In other words, each person records his own, entirely subjec-tive reactions, but by the time the analysis has been completed the result will represent a kind of semantic average reached by purely objective sta-tistical methods.
Ilearners of a foreign language can hardly expect that words will have the same connotation for them as they do for native speakers. This naturally concerns first of all the emotive charge of the lex-ical units. Thus, e.g., it was found that the word rain tends to be described as rather happy by all the subjects of the Southwest Indian groups. The same word was described as rather sad by the overwhelming majority of English subjects.
The method of semantic differential is regarded as an interesting at-tempt to get a better insight into the problem of the connotational meaning. This method, however, has not been as yet properly elaborated and there-fore is scarcely ever used in applied lexicology
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