Methods and Procedures of Lexicological Analysis

1 C. E. Osgood, G. J. Suci and P.H. Tannenbaum. The Measurement of Meaning. USA, 1965.The responses of the subjects produce a semantic profile representing the emotive charge of the word.

The degree of agreement between the answers is treated as a significant and reliable factor.

It may be argued that the data with which they deal in these investigations are essentially subjective. Objectivity, however, concerns the role of the observer. In other words, each person records his own, entirely subjective reactions, but by the time the analysis has been completed the result will represent a kind of semantic average reached by purely objective statistical methods.

Some conclusions of considerable interest may be drawn from these experiments.

1.              It was found that synesthesia or transfer across sensory modalities is apparently a common occurrence. For example, terms, such as “dark — heavy”, “slow — low” tend to be grouped together by a vast majority of subjects and likewise terms such as “bright — light”, “quick — sharp". Synesthesia is also commonly observed in regard to colour responses to music, when, e.g., the hearing of a certain sound induces the visualisation of a certain colour. As a result physical sensations are felt as connected with psychological phenomena.

It seems clear from their studies that imagery found in synesthesia is intimately tied up with language metaphor and that both represent semantic relations. In fact words like warm, cold, heavy, light, bright, dull are universally applied to psychological qualities of temperament or intellect, e.g. to the quality of a voice as well as to sensations.

Practically everyone speaks of warmth in a voice, narrowness of mind and smoothness of manners. Logically it would seem that thermal cold in the skin has nothing to do with coldness heard in a voice or seen in a face. All languages, however, have words that designate physical-psychological pairings. This does not imply that the pairings are identical in all languages. A word denoting a given physical property may develop psychological meanings that are peculiar to this or that language. There is, however, an undeniable kinship in the range of meanings. All seem to involve hightened activity and emotional arousal. No case was discovered in which the word with the denotational meaning ‘hot’ named a remote, calm manner.

2.              The comparison of responses by native speakers of different languages to denotationally “equivalent” words revealed that they have different semantic profiles.

It follows that learners of a foreign language can hardly expect that words will have the same connotation for them as they do for native speakers. This naturally concerns first of all the emotive charge of the lexical units. Thus, e.g., it was found that the word rain tends to be described as rather happy by all the subjects of the Southwest Indian groups. The same word was described as rather sad by the overwhelming majority of English subjects.

The new technique, however, has not been properly developed or extended to an adequate sample of vocabulary and consequently is of little use in lexicological analysis.