Noppawit Boonjoon 5980134822

Wierzbickas approach to componential analysis

Anna Wierzbicka, one of the most famous componentialists, attempted to define the
meaning of the words as much as possible by using a finite set of indispensable notions,
namely primitives. The set of these notions must be basic for all people to understand in the
same way because she believed that these primitives must be able to tell all peoples innate
semantics capacities.
Wierzbickas Semantic Primitives
Substantives: I, you, someone, something, people
Determiners: this, the same, other, some
Augmentor: more
Quantifiers: one, two, many / much, all
Mental predicates: think, know, want, feel, see, hear
Non-mental predicates: move, there is, (be) alive
Speech: say
Actions and events: do, happen
Evaluators: good, bad

Descriptors: big, small

Time: when, after, before, a long time, a short time, now
Space: where, under, above, far, near, side, inside, here
Partonomy: part of
Taxonomy: kind
Metapredicate: can, no, very
Interclausal linkers: if, because, like
Imagination and possibility: if would, maybe
Words: word
Adopt from Cruse (2011)

For example: A is eating B.

1. A is alive.
2. A is doing something to B now.
3. B will be inside A.
4. A feels good to do something to B.
Strength:
1. This analysis provides the basic concept of a word that can be understood by all people of
all languages.
Weakness:
1. We have to know all primitives in the list in order to define meanings of a word.
2. The definition from this analysis is not concise and accurate, compared to Hjelmslevs
analysis. Because of the finite number of primitives, the meaning derived from these
primitives may not be straightforward and, in order to make it clear, it should be explained by
using many sentences which make the definition not concise. While Hjelmslevs analysis
reduces the word into other words with related meanings which finally can be used to define
the meaning of the focused word in shorter and more meaningful way.

Noppawit Boonjoon 5980134822

Motivation for componential approaches
1. Partial similarities

CHICKE
N

MAL
E

FEMAL
E

cock

hen

Words cock and hen mean the same that they are both chickens, but they are also
different because a cock is a male chicken, while a hen is a female chicken.
This shows that these two words have something same and something different in their
meanings, which is called partial similarity.

2. Correlations

MALE

FEMALE

ADULT

man

woman

YOUNG

boy

girl

Each pair of words in the table has partially similarity like the words cock and hen
mentioned earlier.
This table shows a correlation that the components [MALE] and [FEMALE] can
accompany with other components like [ADULT] or [YOUNG] independently.
However, the two components of a word may not be enough to give the full meaning, e.g.
[YOUNG] and [FEMALE] can be components of the word girl as well as the word
filly, which means a young female horse.

3. Discontinuities
In a sentence, there might be a discontinuity which shows the discreteness of its meaning.
In case of ambiguity, the sentence I almost killed her can be interpreted in two ways:
- almost([CAUSE][DIE]) : I did something that can make her dead but she was still alive.
- [CAUSE](almost[DIE]) : I intentionally did something not to make her dead but she
might almost die because of this.
When we read the sentence Thats not a stallion, we will infer that it is a mare. That is,
we focus on only the semantic component [MALE] of the word stallion, but not
[HORSE].
4. Simplex-complex parallels
The word which has simple form can have semantics properties like the complex one. The
complex form means a word which its meaning can be indicated by the morphological
evidence in its form.
For example, the word untrue is expressed its meaning by the morpheme un-, which
means not, so its meaning is not veracious. However, the word false is simply told

Noppawit Boonjoon 5980134822

that it has the same semantic properties as the word untrue without any morphological
evidence.