Question

In our discussion of semantic decomposition, we noted that at least some words have meanings that can be represented in terms of smaller semantic features. Four such words are dog, puppy, cat, and kitten.

i) Attempt to provide the semantic features associated with each of these words.
ii) How are the pairs dog-puppy and cat-kitten different from man-boy and girl-woman?
iii) Try to provide semantic features for the words circle, triangle, and quadrangle. What problems do you encounter?

Answer 1

i) Dog and cat have two senses, one which means adult animal of its species and the other which names the whole species.

We're going to need features like Animal, Canine, Feline, Adult

Dog- +Animal, +Canine, +Feline, +Adult

Puppy- +Animal, +Canine, +Feline, +Adult

Cat- +Animal, +Canine, +Feline, +Adult

Kitten- +Animal, +Canine, +Feline, +Adult

ii). The pairs dog-puppy and cat-kitten differ from man-boy and girl-woman due to gender status, in human people are classified by Sex as male or female, while in animals it isn't male or female, also these species have different features, human features differ from that of the animals listed above.

(iii). It's difficult to find semantic set of features for these words and that's because they can't be generalized.