ABSTRACT
A process developed by Osgood et al. (1957) that attempts to measure the connotative (affective) semantic components of linguistic expressions. This test is administered by presenting subjects with a list of antonymous pairs of related scalar adjectives (e.g. good-bad, happy-sad). The subjects are asked to differentiate the meaning of a given word by placing it on an associative ‘adjective scale.’ In one experiment it turned out that several pairs of adjectives correlated indirectly with one another, that is, their scales turned out to be the same for the given word from subject to subject. From the correlations, Osgood derived three ‘factors of semantic space’ according to which every word can be semantically localized, namely potency (strong/weak, hard/soft, etc.), activity (active/passive, excitable/quiet, etc.), and evaluation (sweet/sour, pretty/ugly, etc.). Osgood’s method for measuring meaning through a factorial analysis has run up against various criticisms, first because of its basically subjective concept of meaning ( connotation) and second because of doubts about the principles used in selecting the predetermined adjective scales (Carroll 1964; Weinreich 1958). Its application ranges from linguistic texts to market and opinion studies.
