Semantic features as the basis for semantic relations within the vocabulary: semantic markers vs. semantic distinguishers

Ivan Mezhevich, group 402

Semantic features as the basis for semantic relations within the vocabulary: semantic markers vs. semantic distinguishers

As we know, the meaning of a lexical item is broken down into smaller sense components. The significant question in this connection is of course the following: how far the extraction of semantic components can or should be taken, or how 'delicate' the meaning analysis should be. Should we extract only those components (e.g. humanness, maleness, animateness, abstractness) which recur throughout the vocabulary of the language and which can plausibly be regarded as universal? Wouldn't this mean stopping short of the point at which all nonsynoymous words are assigned distinct componential analyses? There are non-recurrent, idiosyncratic features of meaning too. If these too were to be treated as sense components, we might end up postulating more meaning components than there are words in a language to be analyzed.

In answer to this puzzle, Each dictionary entry consists of the lexical item to which the entry is assigned, one syntactic marker, one or more semantic markers, one semantic distinguisher and, for some entries, one selection restriction, which may be a logical combination of semantic markers. This distinction is due to Katz and Fodor, (1977) who write:

"Semantic markers are the elements in terms of which semantic relations are expressed in a theory…… the semantic markers assigned to a lexical item in a dictionary entry are intended to reflect whatever systematic relations hold between that item and the rest of the vocabulary of language . On the other hand, the distinguished assigned to a lexical item are intended to reflect what is idiosyncratic about the meaning of that item" (from Fodor 1977: 145).

As an illustration, they gave the following dictionary entry for the English word bachelor:

The elements in parentheses are semantic markers; those in square brackets are distinguishers.

This is, of course, componential analysis, but with a difference. The semantic markers are set up to capture only the most general part of the meaning of each entry. Each semantic marker is postulated only if it is widely applicable to other entries. The meaning of each entry is described in terms of as many markers as are applicable to it while the balance of the meaning is assigned to the distinguisher which can be characterized in any arbitrary fashion, including the way the word is defined in a regular dictionary. The advantage of this version of componential analysis is that the number of semantic markers may remain small. The disadvantage is that the theory is set up to ignore the distinguishers and to operate only with a limited set of markers.

The difference between the semantic markers and distinguishers is thus meant to be the difference between what is general and what is idiosyncratic in the meaning, respectively. The semantic markers represent that part of the meaning of an item on which the whole semantic theory is based and with the help of which all the semantic relations are expressed. If some piece of information is put within a distinguisher it will be ignored by the theory altogether--the theory cannot see, and does not look, inside the distinguisher's square brackets. Nor will the distinguisher be part of any semantic relations; for instance, no ambiguity can be resolved and no paraphrase relation between some two sentences established on the basis of the information in the distinguisher.

This provides one with an important clue as to how to distribute semantic information between markers and distinguishers: if a certain semantic property which one wants one's theory to account for is statable in terms of a certain semantic feature, the latter should be assigned the status of a semantic marker.