Before modern linguistics, the meaning of a word was assumed to be unaccountable. But semanticists have been able to show that the sense of a word can be analyzed in terms of a set of more general sense-components (or semantic properties/features). If you consider the meaning of the following lists of words, you can easily point out the semantic feature shared by each group of words.

　　(a) mother woman mare hen ewe
　　(b) father man stallion rooster bull
　　(c) lad girl chick kitten lamb

　 Words in (a) share the semantic feature FEMALE, those in (b) MALE, and those in (c) YOUNG. This shows that word meaning is analyzable.

　 The approach that analyzes word meaning by decomposing it into its atomic features is called componential analysis (CA). Looking at man, woman, boy and girl from different perspectives, we can write the components of each of them.

(Source: Leech 1981: 87)

The diagram shows that the meaning of each of the four words is composed of three semantic features: +HUMAN, +/-MALE, +/-ADULT. Another way to represent this analysis is to write a semantic formulae in which the semantic properties are represented by symbols like +ADULT, -MALE, etc.

　　man: +HUMAN +ADULT +MALE
　　woman: +HUMAN +ADULT -MALE
　　boy: +HUMAN -ADULT +MALE
　　girl: +HUMAN -ADULT -MALE

Different from these, some words may contain more semantic properties. For example, one sense of the word bachelor can be analyzed in terms of four semantic properties:

　　bachelor: +HUMAN +ADULT +MALE -MARRIED

Reversal antonyms can be analyzed using symbols with an arrow ( → ) to mark the direction. For example:

　　father: +HUMAN +ADULT +MALE → PARENT
　　son: +HUMAN 0ADULT +MALE ← PARENT

The symbol “0” represents the neutralization of the semantic property. A son may be +ADULT or -ADULT.

　 The advantages of this approach to meaning analysis are obvious. Firstly, it is a breakthrough in the formal representation of meaning. Once formally represented, meaning components can be seen. Secondly, it reveals the impreciseness of the terminology in the traditional approach to meaning analysis. Looking at the semantic formula of man and woman again you can see that it is not true that the total meaning of one word contrasts with that of the other. It is merely in one semantic feature that the two words contrast. When we look at the semantic formula of man and father, we find that all the semantic features of man are included in the semantic formulae of father. Then we reach a different conclusion from common sense in regard to the relation between man and father. Is this contradictory? The answer is No. The obvious fact that man includes father is derived from the perspective of reference. Componential analysis examines the components of sense. The more semantic features a word has, the narrower its reference is.

　 The limitations of componential analysis are also apparent. It cannot be applied to the analysis of all lexicon, but merely to words within the same semantic field. It is controversial whether semantic features are universal primes of word meanings in all languages. Nevertheless, CA is so far a most influential approach in the structural analysis of lexical meaning.