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?