The noun-verb intersection method for the study of word meanings
LEO G. M. NOORDMAN, Willem J. M. Levelt · MPG.PuRe (Max Planck Society) · 1978
The aim of the present study is to investigate the semantic structure of concepts.The question is whether concepts can be characterized with respect to semantically significant features and how these features can be detected.This study is part of a cross-lingual research project initiated by Osgood.The meaning of a word is assumed to be composed of a finite set of discrete parts or "features".The psycholinguistic interest is in recovering these features from experimental data, resp.testing their psychological reality.It is supposed that the sets of features of two words (in the present case noun phrase and verb phrase) determine in some way the acceptability of the word combination, e.g. he made a machine is an acceptable combination, whereas he made a horse is not, because a horse is not an artifactual object.The analytic problem, then, is to arrive at a specification of the feature structure of particular words from a set of judgments on their combinatorial possibilities.This study concerns the categorization of nouns.The sample of nouns that has been selected was Osgood's Atlas of Affective Word Meanings.This Atlas has been adapted and translated into the Neth-