Semantics

56 BASIC SEMANTICS
This allows a characterization of antonyms by a difference of the value
plus or minus a feature and so it is a more economical format and better
adapted for computer processing.
In the same fashion the statement of semantic components is also
more economical if we include some redundancy rules which predict the
automatic relationship between components. The following list shows an
example of this rule:
HUMAN> ANIMATE
ADULT > ANIMATE
ANIMATE > CONCRETE
MARRIED> ADULT
etc.
If we state these rules once for the whole dictionary, we can avoid
repeating the component on the right of a rule in each of the entries
containing the component on the left: so every time we enter [HUMAN],
we don’t have to enter [ANIMATE].
The concept of selection restrictions
This concept, also termed as selectional restrictions, has to do with
the fact that arguments in the argument structure can take different
semantic roles and thus affect the semantic features of a word in a string
of words which hold a syntagmatic relation among them. These semantic
roles in turn affect the subsequent syntactic cases that a lexical item can
take in a sentence. That is there must be some kind of semantic
compatibility among the words in a sentence.
For example, the verb charge, when it has the meaning of [indict],
requires a sentient object and the noun crime as the oblique object, whereas
charge meaning [electrify], requires an electrical device as object and a
form of energy as oblique object.
2.5. CONCEPTUAL TOOLS
Dealing with conceptualisation is something that needs to be
approached from a working perspective, that is from a methodological
perspective. This implies defining units of analysis and the basic types
of operations that relate them. From this perspective, the units of analysis