semantic features

Semantic features
Let me start by raising the following question:How would a semantic approach help us to understand something about the nature of language?One way it might be helpful would be as a means of accounting for the oddness we experience when we read English sentences such as the following:
The hamburger ate the man
My cat studied history
A table was listening to some music
Notice that the oddness of these sentences doesnot derive from their syntactic structure.Accordingly to some basic syntactic rules for forming English sentences,we have well-structured sentences:
The hamburger          ate      the man
NP                              V                NP
This sentence is syntactically good,but semanticall odd.If this sentence is acceptable ,what is the source of oddness we experience?One answer may relate to the components of the conceptual meaning of the noun "hamburger"which differ significantaly from those of the noun "man" especially when those nouns are used as subjects of the verb"ate The subjects of such a verb must be capable of eating.the noun "hamburger"desnot have this property.
Is possible to make this observation more generally applicable by trying to determine the crucial components of meaning which a noun must have in order to be used as the subject of the verb"ate".Such a component  may be as general as"animate being".We can then take this component  and use it to describe part of the meaning of words as either plus(+) or minus(---) the feature.Thus,the feature becomes +animate or –animate.This procedure is a way of analyzing meaning  in terms of semantic featuresIf you were asked to give the crucial distinguishing features of this set of English words(table,cow,girl,woman,boy,man) you
Say ,for example,that "table is(-animate,-human,-male,-adult)while "cow" is(+animate,-human,-male,+adult)or"man"(+animate,+human,+male,+adult).