WordNet and Lexical Semantics

(Fellbaum, 1998, xvi)
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Componential semantics approaches the meaning of a word in much the same way it approaches the meaning of a sentence: the meaning of a sentence should be decomposable into the meanings of its constituents, and the meaning of a word should be similarly decomposable into certain semantic primitives, or conceptual atoms. Philip N. Johnson-Laird and I [Fellbaum] had explored componential semantics with much enthusiasm in our 1976 book, Language and Perception, but in 1985 we still did not have a definitive list of the conceptual atoms and it was beginning to look as if, whatever otehr virtures componential lexical semantics might have, it was not the best theory for natural language processing by computers.
Was there an alternative? In 1985 many cognitive psychologists and computational linguists were formulating word meanings in terms of networks, diagrams with nodes to represent meanings and darts to represent relations between the meanings. For exampole, table and furniture would label two nodes and a dart between them would represent the proposition that "a table is a kind of furniture." IS-A-KIND-OF is a semantic relation; no claim is made that the meaning of furniture is a component of the meaning of table. As workers became more self-conscious about the assumptions that are involved in these network representations, it became increasingly obvious that relational lexical semantics is one possible alternative to componential lexical semantics. And Jerry Fodor pointed out that many years earlier Rudolph Carnap had proposed a similar type of relational semantics.
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