SEMANTICS

WRITTEN BY:INDAH SAFITRI

113-11-141

ENGLISH DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION FACULTYSTATE INSTITUTE OF ISLAMIC STUDIES (STAIN)

SALATIGA2014

UNIT 1 ABOUT 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 counts as the equivalent of in the language concerned.

Example :Dialog 1A: ‘We’re going to England next month’.B: ‘Oh. Are you?’

When A in the above exchange says ‘Are you?’ she is talking the truth to B. and it is called Sentence Meaning.

Dialog 2A: ‘When I go away next week, I’m taking your phone’B: ‘Oh. Are you? I need that phone to communicate with my office partner’.

When A in the above exchange says ‘Are you?’ she is thereby in some sense taking up a position opposed to B. It is an example of Speaker Meaning.

A THEORY is a precisely specified, coherent, and economical frame-work 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 describable in terms of it.

Example:Fire is hot.

(All of us know about it and it’s true so, it is called theory. Because theory connects with truth).

UNIT 2 SENTENCES, UTTERANCES, AND

PROPOSITIONSAn UTTERANCE is any stretch of talk, by one person, 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 phrase, or even a single word.

Example:A: ‘We’re going to England next month’.B: ‘Oh. Are you?’

( It’s an example of Utterance. As usual, utterance is written between single quotation marks)

A SENTENCE is neither a physical event nor a physical object. It is, conceived abstractly, a string of words put together by the grammatical rules of a language. 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.

Example:The President now arriving at Senayan is the 11.15 from Soekarno-Hatta

departure.(it is an example of a sentence. Usually, sentence represents by italicized and its grammar is complete)

A PROPOSITION is that part of the meaning of the utterance of a declarative sentence which describes some state of affairs.

Example:Nana loves Ken.Ken loves Nana.(it’s an example of proposition. One sentence could be true and the other

false.)

UNIT 3 REFERENCE AND SENSE

By means of reference, a speaker indicates which things in the world (including persons) are being talked about.

Example:‘My mom is in the market now’My Mom identifies person .The Market identifies thing.

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

Example:I almost fired. I nearly fired.(nearly and almost have one sense)

UNIT 4 REFERRING 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.

Example:Anas Urbaningrum is a corruptor’

(The name Anas Urbaningrum in an utterance such as ‘Anas Urbaningrum is a corruptor’, where the speaker has a particular person in mind when he says ‘Anas Urbaningrum’, is a referring expression).

An OPAQUE CONTEXT is a part of a sentence which could be made 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 sentences with DIFFERENT meanings when uttered in a given situation.

Example:A: ‘Laura Kiehl thinks that the CEO of MNC Group is a genius’B: ‘Laura Kiehl thinks that the Leader of the Hanura is a genius’If for example, Laura Bush believes erroneously that the CEO of MNC Group is not the

Leader of the Hanura , then A and B will mean different things.

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.

Example:Amazon river is the biggest river in the world.The biggest river in the world is Amazon river.(both of them have same meaning)

UNIT 5 PREDICATESThe PREDICATOR of a simple declarative sentence is the word (sometimes a group of

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.

Example:I am happy.(the predicator is Happy. Before you can get predicator, find out the referring

expression first).Note: predicator can be all of part of speech, except Conjunction, to be, and article. \

A PREDICATE is any word (or sequence of words) which (in a given single sense) can function as the predicator of a sentence.

Example:A tall, beautiful woman entered the class.Tall, beautiful, woman, and class are predicate.(predicate can be a predicator in other sentence). In other sentence:She is tall. (tall is a predicator in this sentence)

The DEGREE of a predicate is a number indicating the number of arguments it is normally understood to have in simple sentences. (Argument is referring expressing).

Example:I am happy.I is a predicate of degree one (often called a one-place predicate)

UNIT 6 PREDICATES, REFERRING

EXPRESSIONS,AND UNIVERSE OF

DISCOURSEA GENERIC SENTENCE is a sentence in which some statement is made about a whole unrestricted class of individuals, as opposed to any particular individual.

Example:The male prefer to marry lastly.

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

Example:Mother to child: ‘Santa Claus might not bring you a toy because you’re very

naughty ’.Note that no universe of discourse is a totally fictitious world. Santa Claus is a

fiction, but the toy he might bring do actually exist.

UNIT 7 DEIXIS AND DEFINITENESS

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

Example:Cinta Laura says ‘I’ve lost the contract’

The first person singular pronoun I is deictic. When Cinta Laura says ‘I’ve lost the contract’, the word I here refers to Cinta Laura.

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.

Example:If I carry on a conversation with a friend about the time, five years earlier, when we first met

in England (and we are now holding the conversation in front of my house):‘Do you remember when we met at the university?’

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 discourse.

Example:May I took that pen?That pen is definite. It can only appropriately be

used when the speaker assumes the hearer can tell which pen is being referred to.

UNIT 8 WORDS AND THINGS:EXTENSIONS AND PROTOTYPES

The EXTENSION of a one-place predicate is the set of all individuals to which that predicate can truthfully be applied.

Example:The extension of cat is the set of all cats in the universe. It can be Anggora,

Persia, etc.

A 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. In other words, the prototype of a predicate can be thought of as the most typical member of the extension of a predicate.

Example:A boy of standard height and average build, between 15 and 20 years old, with

brownish hair, with no particularly distinctive characteristics or defects, could be a prototype of the predicate boy in certain areas of the world.

UNIT 9 SENSE PROPERTIES AND STEREOTYPES

An ANALYTIC sentence is one that is necessarily TRUE, as a result of the senses of the words in it. An analytic sentence, therefore, reflects a tacit (unspoken) agreement by speakers of the language about the senses of the words in it.

Example:All cats are animalsThe truth of the sentence follows from the senses of cat and animal.

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

Example:Kai is from ChinaThere is nothing in the senses of Kai is from China or from which makes this

necessarily true or false.

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

Example: He was born by his father.This must be false because human was born by their mother not their father.

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.

Example:Take the predicate triangle, as usually understood in geometry. ‘Three-sided’ is a

necessary condition for this predicate, since for anything to be a square, it must be tree-sided.

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 in themselves to GUARANTEE that the predicate correctly describes that thing.

Example:‘Three-sided, equal-sided, and containing right angles’ is a sufficient set of

conditions for the predicate triangle, since if anything meets all of these conditions, it is guaranteed to be a triangle.

The STEREOTYPE of a predicate is a list of the TYPICAL characteristics or features of things to which the predicate may be applied.

Example:The stereotypes of elephant:Big, fat, grey, has a trunk and tusk, etc.

UNIT 10 SENSE RELATIONS (1)IDENTITY AND SIMILARITY OF SENSESYNONYMY is the relationship between two predicates that have the same

sense.Example:In most dialects of English, occur and happen are synonyms.

A sentence which expresses the same proposition as another sentence is a PARAPHRASE of that sentence (assuming the same referents for any referring expressions involved).

Example:Aria sells this book to Sari.This book was sell by Aria to Sari.

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.

Example:Nice, good, great, etc

Synonymy can be seen as a special case of hyponymy, i.e. SYMMETRICAL HYPONYMY.

Example:For example, given two synonyms, such as red and scarlet, we say for

convenience that these also illustrate the hyponymy relationship, and that mercury and quicksilver are hyponyms of each other.

A proposition X ENTAILS a proposition Y if the truth of Y follows necessarily from the truth of X.

Example:Raina fried an egg entails Rania cooked an egg.

Two sentences may be said to be PARAPHRASES of each other if and only if they have exactly the same set of ENTAILMENTS; or, which comes to the same thing, if and only if they mutually entail each other so that whenever one is true the other must also be true.

Example: I almost fell overI nearly fell overTherefore,I almost fell over is a paraphrase of I nearly fell over