Lexical Decomposition

Understanding English
Linguistics
Chapter 3 Semantics
: Lexical Decomposition
Tae-Jin Yoon
Dept. of English Language and
Literature
Overview and Objectives
After completing this lecture, students
should be able to
 Identify the semantic feature(s) that
distinguish or unify a related set of words
(e.g., man, boy).
Background
Contribution to semantics
 Linguistics
◦ The study of the core meanings or sense of
individual words

Philosophy
◦ The study of the meaning of sentences
 Approached from the study of reference and the
study of truth conditions
Lexical decomposition
One method used to characterize the
sense of words
 This method represents the sense of a
word in terms of the semantic features
that comprise it.
 Lexical semantic features provides a
useful, but somewhat limited, account
of the meaning of words.

[adult] & [male]
man woman boy
girl
[adult] +
+
-
-
[male] +
-
+
-
Advantages of lexical decomposition
1.
2.
3.
It explains our intuitions as speakers of
English that the meanings of man and boy
are more closely related than are the
meanings of man and girl.
It is easy to characterize the senses of
additional words by adding features.
This method allows us, at least in principle,
to characterize the senses of a potentially
infinite set of words with a finite
number of semantic features.
man woman
boy
girl
stallion
mare colt
filly
[adult]
+
+
-
-
+
+
-
-
[male]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
-
-
+
-
-
[human]
Practical limitations of lexical
decomposition
1.
2.
Exactly how many and which features
constitute the universal set of semantic
properties?
Nouns, especially concrete nouns, seem
to lend themselves to lexical
decomposition more readily than do
other parts of speech
Exercise A.1

What semantic feature or property
differentiates the following sets of nouns?
(Hint by figuring out what the two
subsets have in common.)
niece, daughter, sister vs. nun, woman,
girl
Exercise A.1

What semantic feature or property
differentiates the following sets of nouns?
(Hint by figuring out what the two subsets
have in common.)
mailman, nephew, priest vs. gander, stag,
bull
Exercise A.1
What semantic feature or property
differentiates the following sets of nouns?
(Hint by figuring out what the two subsets
have in common.)

hen, ewe, cow vs. rooster, ram, bull
A riddle
A father and a son are riding in a car.The car
hits a truck.The father dies and son is rushed
to the emergency room of a nearby hospital.
The doctor comes and says, I can't operate on
this boy. He's my son.
What is the relationship between the
doctor and the boy?