SEMANTICSBy : Latifatul Auliana

113-11-142

1.Basic Ideas in Semantics

UNIT 1About Semantics

• Semantic is the study of MEANING in LANGUAGE.• Speaker meaning is what a speaker meaning (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 counts as the equivalent of in the language concerned.

example :Alan: Are you going to Paul’s party?Barb: I have to work.(If this was a typical exchange, Barb meant that she is not going to Paul’s party. But the sentence she uttered does not mean that she is not going to Paul’s party.)

• A theory is a precisely specified coherent and economical framwork of independent statements and definitions, constructed so that as large a number as possible of particular basic facs can either be seen to follow from it or be describle in terms of it.

example :(1) Barack Obama is the 44th president of the United States.(2) John McCain is the 44th president of the United States.

< = > (1) is true, and (2) is false. Obviously, this difference in truth-value is traceable to some difference between the expressions ‘Barack Obama’ and ‘John McCain.’ What about these expressions explains the difference in truth-value between these sentences? It is very plausible that it is the fact that ‘Barack Obama’ stands for the man who is in fact the 44th president of the United States, whereas ‘John McCain’ stands for a man who is not. This indicates that the reference of a proper name—its contribution to the determination of truth conditions of sentences in which it occurs—is the object for which that name stands.

UNIT 2Sentences, Utterances, and Prepositions

Utterances

AN UTTERANCE is any stretch of talk, by one personm before and after which there is silence on the part of that person.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 phrasem or even a single word.

example :(1) John said [that she came].(2) John says [he will not do the job].Examples (1) – (2) provide instances of utterance complements in English (utterance complements will be enclosed in square brackets in the examples):

Sentences

A SENTENCE is neither physical event nor a physical object. It is conceived abstractly a string of words put together by the grammaticaly rules of a language.A santance can be thought of as the IDEAL string of words behind various realizations in utterences and incriptions.

PREPOSITIONSA PREPOSITION is that part of the meaning of

tha utterance of a declarative sentence which describe some state of affairs.

Example:The tall, stately building fell is said to express propositions corresponding to the following:“The building is tall.”“The building is stately.”“The building fell.”

UNIT 3Reference And Sense

REFERENCE is the relationship between the English expression this page (part of the language) and the thing you could hold between your finger and thus (part of the world).

The SENSE of an expression is its place in a system of semantic of relationships with other expression in the language.

Example :‘The husband of Barbara Bush is the President who

succeeded Ronald Reagan.’• Reference is: A [former] President of the USA (George

Bush senior);• and the two Senses are:

1. The husband of Barbara Bush; and2. The man who became President after Ronald Reagan.

2.From Reference . . .

UNIT 4Referring Expressions

• A REFERRING EXPRESSION is any expression used in an utterance to refer to something or someone (or a clearly delimited collection of things or people), i.e. used with a particular referent in mind.

Examples :- a noun phrase of any structure, such as:

the taxi in The taxi’s waiting outside; the apple on the table in Bring me the apple on the table; and those five boys in Those five boys were off school last week.

- a noun-phrase surrogate, i.e. a pronoun, such as: it in It’s waiting outside and Bring me it; and they in They were off school last week.

- a proper name, like Sarah, London, The Eiffel Tower, or The Beatles.

• An OPAQUE CONTEXT is a part of a sentence which could be made into complete sentence by the addition of a referring expression but where the addition of different referring expression, 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 :“Lois believes X is a hero” is an opaque context.Because : “Louis believes Superman is a hero” is true while “Lois believes Clark Kent is a hero” is false, even though ‘Superman’ and ‘Clark Kent’ are co-referential expressions.

• An EQUATIVE SENTENCE is one which is used to assert the identity of the referents of two referring expressions, i.e. to assert that two referring expressions have the same referent.

Examples :•Mrs. Laura is my lecturer.•That man who walks fast is my brother.•Dr. Jekyll is Mr. Hyde

UNIT 5PREDICATES

A PREDICATE is any word (or sequence of word) which (in a given single sense) can function as the predicator of a sentence.Example :In the sentence ‘John saw his friend’, “saw his friend” is the predicate.

A PREDICATOR is a simple declarative sentence is the word (some times a group of words) which does not belong to any of the referring expressions and which of the reminder, makes the most specific contribution to the meaning of the sentence.Example :- Joko is IndonesianThe predicator is Indonesian and the argument is Joko- The police killed Paiman The predicator is the police and the argument is Paiman

The DEGREE of a predicate is a number indicating the number of arguments it is normally understood to have in simple sentences.Example :The majority of adjectives are one-place predicates (John is tall), execp for adjectives which require prepositions (Cars are different from bikes) and are two-place predicates.

UNIT 6Predicates, Referring Expressions, and

Universe of Discourse

The distiction between referring expressions and predicates is absolute : there is not a continuum running from proper names at one end, through ‘borderline cases’ to verbs and prepositions at the some entity in the world or it is not so used.

The presence of a predicate in a referring expression helps the hearer to identify the referent of a referring expression.

To sum up, predicates do not refer. But they can used by a hearer when contained in the meaning of a referrring expression, to identify the referent of that expressions.

We define the UNIVERSE OF DICOURSE for any utterances as the particular world real or imaginary (or part real, part imaginary) that the speaker assumes he is talking about at the time.

Example :in using :a. the universe of discourse can be all human beings (and the sentence is most certainly not true), or it may be a restricted set of human beings (and the sentence may very well be true).b. the universe of discourse has been explicitly restricted by the adjunct in this room.

UNIT 7Deixis And Definiteness

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

Example :- Person deixis: They tried to hurt me, but he came to the rescue.- Gender deixis: A man is responsible for his own soul.as opposed to: - Each person is responsible for his or her own soul.- Place deixis: Here is a good spot; it is too sunny over there.- Time deixis: It is raining out now, but I hope when you read this it will be sunny.

DEFINITENESS is a 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 or because it is unique in the universe of discource.

Example :“a car” or “cars” do not refer to anything specific in the world and thus both examples are indefinite. Conversely, “my car” or “my cars” both refer to actual objects in the world and thus both examples are definite.

UNIT 8Words and Things :

Extentions and Prototypes

The EXTENTION of a one-place predicates is the set of all individuals to which that predicate can truthfully be applied. It is the set of things which can POTENTIALLY be referred to by using an expression whose main element is that predicate.

Example :The word "dog" is the set of all (past, present and future) dogs in the world: the set includes Fido, Rover, Lassie, Rex, and so on. The extension of the phrase "Wikipedia reader" includes each person who has ever read Wikipedia.

A PROTOTYPE of 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.

Example :Person has purchased ‘furniture,’ you would infer, in the absence of information to the contrary, that he or she had been buying tables, chairs, and beds, not clocks, lamps, and footstools.

3.. . . To Sense

UNIT 9Sense Properties and Stereotypes

The SENSE of an expression is its indispensable hard core of meaning.Example :

John is a bachelor.

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

Example :All bachelors are unmarried.

A SYNTHETIC sentence is one which is NOT analytic, but may be either true or false, depending on the way the world is.

Example :All bachelors are happy.

A CONTRADICTION is a sentence that is necessarily FALSE, as a result of the sense of the words in it. Thus a contradiction is in a way the opposite of an analytic sentence

Example :All bachelors are married.

NOTE :A NACESSARY 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 athing, are enough in themselves to GUARANTEE that the predicate correctly describes that thing.

UNIT 10Sense Relations

SYNONYMY is the relationship between two predicates that habe the same sense.

A sentence whis expresses the same proposition as another sentence is a PARAPHRASE of that sentence (assuming the same referents for any referring expressions involved).Paraphrase is to SENTENCES (on individual interprestations) as SYNONYMY is to PREDICATES (though some semanticts talk loosely of synonymy in the case of sentences as well).

Example :buy as synonym of purchase ask as synonym of request mad as synonym of insane

HYPOTYMY 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.

Example : triumph as hyponym of success profound as hyponym of deep fortune as hyponym of luck

We define HYPONYMY in such a way that SYNONYMY counts as a special case of hyponymy.

For example, given two synonymys such as mercury and quicksilver, we say for convinience that these also illustrate the hyponymy relationship, and that mercury and quicksilver are hyponymy of each other. Thus synonymy can be seen as a special case of hyponymy, i. e. SYMMERICAL HYPONYMY.

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