Филология ф акультеті «Ағылшын филологиясы» кафедрасы

woman from that of girl. The comparison of the results of the componental analysis of the words boy and girl would also show the difference just in one component, i..e. the sememe denoting ‘male’ and ‘female’ respectively.
It should be pointed out that componential analysis deals with individual meanings. Different meanings of polysemantic words have different componential 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 servant (any age) esp. in African and Asian countries) reveals that though both of them contain the semantic components ‘human’ and ‘male’ the component ‘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.
In its classical form componential analysis was applied to the so-called closed subsystems of vocabulary, mostly only to kinship and colour terms. The analysis as a rule was formalised only as far as the symbolic representation of meaning components is concerned. Thus, e.g. in the analysis of kinship terms, the component denoting sex may be represented by A — male, A — female, В may stand for one generation above ego, В — for the generation below ego, С — for direct lineality, С — for indirect lineality, etc. Accordingly the clusters of symbols ABC and ABC represent the semantic components of the word mother, and father respectively.
7. All the methods of semantic analysis discussed above are aimed mainly or exclusively at the investigation of the denotational component of the lexical meaning.
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. 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.