The traditional model of writing definitions for words, which we discussed in Chapter 6, seems to assume that word meanings can (in many cases) be broken down into smaller elements of meaning.1 For example, we defined ewe as ‘an adult female sheep’, which seems to suggest that the meanings of the words sheep, adult, and female are included in the meaning of ewe.2 In fact, if the phrase ‘adult female sheep’ is really a synonym for ewe, one might say that the meaning of ewe is simply the combination of the meanings of sheep, adult, and female. Another way to express this intuition is to say that the meanings of sheep, adult, and female are components of the meaning of ewe.
In this chapter we introduce some basic ideas about how to identify and represent a word’s components of meaning. Most components of meaning can be viewed as entailments or presuppositions which the word contributes to the meaning of a sentence in which it occurs. We discuss lexical entailments in §7.2 and selectional restrictions in §7.3. Selectional restrictions are constraints on word combinations which rule out collocations such as #Assassinate that cockroach! or #This cabbage is nervous, and we will treat them as a type of presupposition.
In §7.4 we summarize one influential approach to word meanings, in which components of meaning were represented as binary distinctive features. We will briefly discuss the advantages and limitations of this approach, which is no longer widely used. In §7.5 we introduce some of the foundational work on the meanings of verbs.
Our study of the components of word meanings will primarily be based on evidence from sentence meanings, for reasons discussed in earlier chapters. We focus here on descriptive meaning. Of course, words can also convey various kinds of expressive (or affective) meaning, signaling varying degrees of politeness, intimacy, formality, vulgarity, speaker’s attitudes, etc., but we will not attempt to deal with these issues in the current chapter.
1 Engelberg (2011: 126).
2 Svensén (2009: 218), in his Handbook of Lexicography, identifies such intensional definitions as “the classic type of definition”. He explicitly defines intension (i.e. sense) in terms of components of meaning: “The term intension denotes the content of the concept, which can be defined as the combination of the distinctive features comprised by the concept.” Svensén seems to have in mind the representation of components of word meaning as binary distinctive features, the approach discussed in §7.4 below.
