SEMANTICS

By Ria puspitasari 11311061

Basic ideas in semantics

• Semantics is the study of MEANING in LANGUAGE

• Speaker meaning is what a speaker means (i.e intends to convey) when he uses a piece of language.

• Sentence meaning (or word meaning is what a sentence (or word) means, i.e. what it count as the equivalent of in the language concerned.

• Theory is precisely specified, coherent, and economical framework of interdependent statements and definitions, constructed so that as large a number as possible of particular basic facts can either be seen to follow from it or be de scribable in terms of it.

SENTENCE, UTTERANCES AND PROPOSITIONS

• An utterance is any stretch o talk, by one person, before and after which there is silence on the part of that person. Double quotation marks (“…”) represents an utterance.

• An utterance is the use by a particular speaker, on a particular occasion, of a piece of language, such as a sequence of sentences, or a single word.

Exp : “wow”, “thank you”, “help”, etc

• A sentence is neither a physical event nor a physical object. It is conceived abstractly, a string o words put together by the grammatical rules of a language. Anything italicized represents a sentence. A sentence can be thought of as the IDEAL string of words behind various realizations in utterances and inscriptions.

• A SENTENCE is a grammatically complete string of words expressing a complete thought.

Exp : I would like a cup of tea.please put it in the bedroom.

• Proposition is that part of the meaning of the utterance of a declarative sentence which describes some state of affairs. True proposition correspond to facts, in the ordinary sense of the word fact. False propositions do not correspond to facts.

• A proposition is an abstraction that can be grasped by the mind of an individual person.

Exp :An Aristotelian proposition may take the form : "All men are mortal" "Socrates is a man.““Socrates is mortal.”

REFERENCE AND SENSE

• Reference is a speaker indicates which things in the world (including persons) are being talked about.

Exp:“my brother is in the coffee shop”.

identifies person identifies thing

• Sense of an expression is its place in a system of semantic relationships with other expressions in the language.

Exp :Your gatepost doesn’t seem to be quite vertical

upright

We can talk about the sense, not only of words, but also longer expressions.

REFERRING EXPRESSIONS• A referring expression is any expression used

in an utterance to refer to something or someone (or a clearly delimited collection o things or people) i.e used with a particular referring in mind.

Exp : When the speaker has a particular person in mind when he says “a girl sitting on the wall by the bus stop”. “a girl”, is referring expression.

• Opaque context is a part o a sentence which could be mad into a complete sentence by the addition of a referring expression, but where the addition of different referring expressions, even though they refer to the same thing or person, in a given situation, will yield sentence with DIFFERENT meanings when uttered in a given situation.

Example of Opaque context :• Tia believes that Gary took the book.• Tia believes that the person in the corner took

the book.If, for example, Tia believes erroneously that

person in the corner is not Gary, then A and B will mean different thing.

• An equative sentence is one which is used to assert the identity of the referrents of two referring expression, i.e to assert that two referring expressions have the same referent.

Exp :Gary is the person in the corner.That man over there is my brother.

PREDICATES

• Predicator of simple declarative sentence is the word (sometimes a group o words) which does not belong to any of the referring expressions and which, of the remainder, makes the most specific contribution to the meaning of the sentence.

Exp :handsome is the predicator in Gary is handsome.

• Predicate is any word (or sequence of words) which (in a given single sense) an function as the predicator of the sentence.

Exp :cook, hungry, angry, show, hit, are all predicates except conjunction and article (and, or, but, not).

• Degree of predicate is a number indicating the number of arguments it is normally understood to have in simple sentence.

Exp :She is angry (she as argument, angry as

predicator)o Argument only one (I) so it called a one place

predicate.

• Risa eat meet ball ( Risa :argument, eat : predicator, and meet ball : argument)

o There are two argument, so it called two place predicate.

PREDICATES, REFERRING EXPRESSIONS, AND UNIVERSE OF DISCOURSE

• A generic sentence is a sentence in whch some statement made about a whole unrestricted class o individuals, as opposed particular individual.

Exp:The lion is carnivore (understood by every

people in the universe).

• Universal of discourse for any utterance as the particular world real, real or imaginary (or part real, part imaginary) that the speaker assumes he is talking about at the time.

Exp :Santa clause is fiction, but the toy telephones he might bring do actually exist.

DEIXIS AND DEFINITENESS

• Deictic word is one which takes some element of its meaning from the situation (i.e the speaker, addressee, the time and place) of the utterance in which it is used.

Exp: I enjoy living in this city. She was sitting over there.

• The context of an utterance is a small subpart of the universe of discourse shared by speaker and hearer, and includes facts about the topic of the conversation in which the utterance occurs, and also facts about the situation in which the conversation itself takes place.

• Definiteness is feature of a noun phrase selected by a speaker to convey his assumption that the hearer will be able to identify the referent of the noun phrase, usually because it is the only thing of its kind in the context of the utterance.

Exp :The snake is a cold blood animal. It is the only thing

in a normal universe of discourse known by this name.

WORD AND THINGS : EXTENSION AND PROTOTYPE

• Extension of one-place predicate is the set o all individuals to which that predicate can truthfully be applied.

Exp:The extension of table is the set of all table in

the universeThe extension of rabbits is the set of all rabbits

in the universe

• Prototype of a predicate is an object which is held to be very typical of the kind of object which can be referred to by an expression containing the predicate.

Exp :‘creatures that are covered with feathers, have two wings and two legs, and the majority of which can fly‘ could be a prototype of the predicate bird in the world.

SENSE PROPERTIES AND STEREOTYPES

• An analytic sentence is one that necessarily TRUE, as a result of the senses of words in it.

Exp:All lions is animals. Frozen water is ice. • A synthetic sentence is one which is NOT

analytic, but maybe either true or false, depending on the way the world is.

Exp :My computer is on. Rian is handsome

• A contradiction is a sentence that is necessarily FALSE, as a result of the senses o the words in it.

Exp :jellyfish are plans. (this mush be false, because jellyfish are animals, not plans but animals)

• A necessary condition on the sense of a predicate is a condition (or criterion) which a thing MUST meet in order to qualify as being correctly described by that predicate.

• A sufficient set of conditions on the sense of a predicate is a set of conditions (or criteria) which, if they are met by a thing, are enough n themselves to GUARANTEE that the predicate correctly describes that thing.

• The stereotype of a predicate is a list of the typical characteristics of things which the predicate may be applied.

Exp: The stereotype of girls would be something like :Girls are not good at sports , Girls are messy and unclean, girls are good at cooking, etc

SENSE RELATION

• Synonymy is the relationship between two predicates that have the same sense.

Exp : o Beautiful: Attractive, Pretty, Lovely, Stunningo Funny: Humorous, Comical, Hilarious,

Hystericalo Unhappy: Sad, Depressed, Melancholy,

Miserable

• Paraphrase is a sentence which expresses the same proposition as another sentence.

Exp :The gray clouds were a warning of an approaching storm. The coming storm was foretold by the dark clouds.

• Hyponymy is a sense relation between predicates (or sometimes longer phrases) such that the meaning of one predicate (or phrase) is included in the meaning of the other.

Exp :It describes what happens when we say 'An X is a kind of Y‘. A jasmine is a kind of flower, or simply, jasmine is a flower."

THANK YOU