Semantic Feature Analysis

Semantic Feature Analysis, or Componential Analysis, is a method for understanding word meaning by decomposing concepts into minimal meaningful units called semantic features or components. Developed by Ward Goodenough in 1956, this approach represents the meaning of words as bundles of features (e.g., 'woman' = [human] [adult] [female]), enabling systematic analysis of semantic relationships, kinship systems, plant classifications, and lexical fields. The method is grounded in structural linguistics and has applications in anthropology, cognitive linguistics, and lexicography.