The methods of lingustic research used in lexicology

2.1 The results of the co-occurrence or distributional analysis may be of great help to teachers in preparation of teaching material
To illustrate the point under consideration it is sufficient to discuss the experiment the goal of which was to find out the semantic peculiarities of the verb to giggle. Giggle refers to a type of laughter — to giggle is usually defined as ‘to laugh in a nervous manner’. There is nothing in the dictionary definition to indicate a very important peculiarity of the word-meaning, i.e. that giggling is habitually associated with women⁵. A completion test carried out by a group of English linguists yielded interesting results.
The sentences to be completed were of the type: The man — with obvious pleasure, The woman — with obvious pleasure, etc. The informants were to fill in the blanks with either the verb to laugh or to giggle and were presented with a choice of subjects male and female. A clear preference was shown for women giggling and men laughing with obvious pleasure. The analysis of the informants’ responses also showed that a man may giggle drunkenly or nervously, but not happily or politely. In the case of women, however, of whom giggling is more characteristic it appears that all collocations — giggle drunkenly, nervously, happily, politely — are equally acceptable. It may be inferred from the above that the meaning by co-occurrence is an inherent part and an essential component of the word-meaning.
2.2 Method of Semantic Differential
All the methods of semantic analysis discussed above are aimed mainly or exclusively at the investigation of the denotational component of the lexical meaning.
The analysis of the differences of the connotational meaning is very hard since the nuances are often slight, difficult to grasp and do not yield themselves to objective investigation and verification.
An attempt to establish and display these differences was developed by a group of American psycholinguists.1 They set up a technique known as the semantic differential by means of which, as they claim, meaning can be measured. It is perfectly clear, however, that what semantic differential measures is not word-meaning in any of accepted senses of the term but the connotational component of meaning or to be more exact the emotive charge.
Their technique requires the subjects to judge a series of concepts with respect to a set of bipolar (antonymic) adjective scales. For example, a concept like horse is to be rated as to the degree to which it is good or bad, fast or slow, strong or weak, etc.
The meaning of the seven divisions is, taking as an example the first of the scales represented above, from left to right: extremely good, quite good, slightly good, neither good nor bad (or equally good and bad) slightly bad, quite bad, extremely bad.
In the diagram above horse is described as neither good nor bad, extremely fast, quite strong, slightly hard, equally happy and sad.

1 C. E. Osgood, G. J. Suci and P.H. Tannenbaum. The Measurement of Meaning. USA, 1965.The responses of the subjects produce a semantic profile representing the emotive charge of the word.

The degree of agreement between the answers is treated as a significant and reliable factor.
It may be argued that the data with which they deal in these investigations are essentially subjective. Objectivity, however, concerns the role of the observer. In other words, each person records his own, entirely subjective reactions, but by the time the analysis has been completed the result will represent a kind of semantic average reached by purely objective statistical methods.