An attempt is made in this paper to describe some English transitive verbs in terms of lexico-semantic features and hypothesize their sememic structure. The verbs treated here are 1) hit, knock, pound, punch, slap, beat, rap, cuff, tap, 2) break, crush, squash, smash, 3) cut, slice, chop, trim, clip, carve, saw, hack, shear, split, tear, rip, all of which can be said to share a feafure like “physical activitty” when contrasted with verbs such as think, remember, memorize, etc., with a featuer like “mental activity”in common.
The results obtained are roughly outlined as follows.
The verbs in 1) group can be said to have a feature “impact” in common and belong to a semantic field (by semantic field we understand here a group of words having the same feature in common) with this common feature. Hit is divided into two sememes: hit (1) with a feature “give a blow” and hit (2) with a feature “collide with an impact”. Since punch, pound, slap, beat, rap, cuff can be defined with hit (1), they share the feature “give a blow”, together with their own features concerning the manner when a blow is given, the instrument used, object hit, or the degree of the force applied, etc. Besides “impact”, knock has a feature “the object or person knocked moves” and tap has a definite feature on the instrument to tap with.
The verbs in 2) have a common feature like “destroy an object.” Break has a feature concerning an object broken and, crush and smash are differentiated by the kind of the force applid. Squash can be defined with crush and has a feature on the object in addition to a feature shared by crush.
The feature “divide” may be said to be common to all verbs in 3), which belong to a semantic field with “divide” as its common feature. Cut and tear are distinguished by the instrument used. Cut is “divide”“with sharp edged instrument” whereas tear is “divide”“with not sharp edged instrument, usually with hands” and further has a feature on the object divided (usually, paper, leaf, cloth or a soft piece of bread or things like that). Rip is defined by tear and so shares a feature of tear with additional feature like “violent or rough action”, which tear does not contain. Split has a feature concerning both the way the thing divides and the object divided (solid object). As Slice, chop, trim, clip, carve, saw, hack, shear can all be defined by cut, they share a feature “divide with sharp edged instrument” and in addition they also have a feature peculiar to each of them concerning the instrument used, object cut, manner (the way the cutting action is done), sound when cutting action is done, etc.
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