In the name Of God
Chapter 8
Discovering Meaning By Grouping & contrast
The Meaning of a lexical Item can only be discovered by studying that particular item in contrast to Other items which are closely related.There is no meaning apart from significant differences /Contrasts.By grouping toghether words which are related to one another and then Systematically Looking at the contrast between these words,One is able to determine the meaning.The Shared meaning Components and the Contrastive meaning components can thus be describe more precisely.Lexical item are related in Various ways and occur in various kind of semantic sets.

Part-Whole relation
One way in which language group word is by the relationship known as Part-Whole.For e.gI in English chin,cheek,forehead , nose and ear are all parf of the head.Head ,Hand ,neck.trunk.arms leg and feet are all part the body.THERE ARE MANY SETS MADE UP OF WORDS IN A PART –Whole relationship in lng.there will be sets of words describing parts of house,parts of a machine, part of a village the structural organization of a country ,political organizations,and many others.when a translator is studying the part-whole groupings of two languages,it will often becomes clear that there is no exact equivalent for some the words. Some will be missing in one lng or another. The Reason for this is that various lngs classify and subdivide broad areas of knowledge in different ways.
Contrastive pairs
Contrastive pairs may be very helpful in determining the meaning of particular words.
For e.g a person who translating Russian terminology will need to discover the different between a party congress and party conference ,a worker and an employee ,a technicalschool and a trade school and a terriotory and a national area.when the source lng has closely related pairs like these ,it will be important for the translator to find the components of meaning which distinguish the one from the other if he is to translate accurately.
The principle of Contrast in identifying meaning is very important.However,before any two lexical items are to be comparedthe must to belong to a system of some kind. There would be no advantages to compairing the word leg with the word house.they don’t make a pair for comparison. On the other hand, a great deal can be learned about of words by comparing leg with other body parts and comparing house with the kind of building.therefore in order to study meaning it is necessary to have words in sets which share some features of meaning and have some contrastive feature as well.


Componential analysis
The meaning components of words may also be more easily isolated by looking at lexical matrices.the pronominal systems of the source and receptor lngs should be compared to see where there are differences between the two system might cause problems in translation. Componential analysis has often been used to analyze system.
Kind of meaning components
We can make a display for the English words man.woman.boy,girl beacase there are human beings .they have a generic component which the shared as the central component or central component.the meaning components which distinguish them one from te other and have been used as a lables for displays are contrastive components.There are the component which help in distinguishing one word from another in the set .
Very Often two lngs will have the same set as far as the generic component is concered,but the contrastive component will be different.There may be more lexical items or less lexical items in the set and the contrastive component may not match.
By: Fatemeh Khalili Master: Mr MoghimoEslam