A method of semantic description

The North Queensland language Dyirbal includes a special ‘mother-in-law language’ which provides a unique set of data suggesting the form that the semantic description of the verbs of a natural language should take. We will describe the ‘mother-in-law language’. §2 explains and justifies the method of semantic description that is suggested by the complex correspondences that exist between mother-in-law vocabulary and the vocabulary of the everyday Dyirbal language. we applied the method to a semantic description of Dyirbal verbs. (omitting the last paragraph).¹

Two well-known approaches to semantic description - the componential method and the definitional method - each provide certain insights, but each also has rather serious drawbacks. The method of semantic description described in this paper combines the insights of these two approaches without at the same time taking over any of their drawbacks. Briefly, the lexical verbs of a language are held to fall naturally into two mutually exclusive sets: nuclear verbs and non-nuclear verbs. Componential semantic descriptions can be provided for the nuclear verbs, in terms of a small set of rather general and well-motivated semantic features (some of which are also likely to underlie categories in the grammar of the language). The semantic content of non-nuclear verbs can be defined in terms of semantic descriptions of nuclear verbs (or of previously defined non-nuclear words), and the syntactic apparatus of the language.

¹ Field work in 1963, 1964 and 1967 was supported by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies and the Central Research Fund of the University of London. This paper is an up-dated condensation of the semantics section of my Ph.D. thesis (Dixon 1968 a) which was written whilst I was at University College London; the final version of the paper was written whilst I was visiting lecturer at Harvard University, 1968/9 and was supported in part by NSF grant GS-1934. Whatever value it has is due largely to the intelligence, patience and willingness of Chloe Grant and George Watson, the two main informants. I am also grateful to Michael Silverstein for his critical comments on the paper.