Download Ngữ Nghĩa Học - Semantic and more Study notes English Language in PDF only on Docsity!
i
LỜI GIỚI THIỆU
Bài giảng Ngữ nghĩa học dành cho sinh viên năm thứ 3 sau khi có được một năng lực ngôn ngữ ở mức độ trung cấp (upper- intermediate) để có thể tiếp cận với một số thuật ngữ và khái niệm trong lý thuyết Ngữ nghĩa học. Bài giảng Ngữ nghĩa học cung cấp cho sinh viên những hiểu biết chuyên sâu về ngữ nghĩa học bao gồm các kiến thức về nghĩa và các phương pháp nghiên cứu ngữ nghĩa học, giúp sinh viên có một kiến thức nhất định trong việc giảng dạy và nghiên cứu ngôn ngữ. Ngoài ra, bài giảng Ngữ nghĩa học còn phát triển năng lực nghiên cứu, bước đầu biết đánh giá phê phán một số lý thuyết ngữ nghĩa học ở người học. Người học sẽ có cơ hội để phát triển một số thủ pháp nghiên cứu, cụ thể là sau khi học xong học phần này, sinh viên nắm được: khái niệm cơ bản về nghĩa, phương pháp phân tích thành tố nghĩa, các cách nhìn truyền thống về ý nghĩa từ vựng và ý nghĩa ngữ pháp, cũng như các cách giải thích truyền thống về hiện tượng đa nghĩa, đồng nghĩa, đồng âm…., các quan hệ ý, quan hệ mệnh đề, và ý nghĩa của câu và của các phát ngôn Bài giảng Ngữ nghĩa học (2 tín chỉ) gồm 5 bài: Bài 1: Giới thiệu chung về ngữ nghĩa và các vấn đề ngữ nghĩa nghiên cứu Bài 2: Trình bày các vấn đề về ý nghĩa từ vựng, các hiện tượng đồng âm , đa nghĩa, đồng nghĩa, trái nghĩa, định danh và ý, và sự biến đổi và phát triển của nghĩa Bài 3: Trình bày các mối quan hệ về ý nghĩa, các loại quan hệ ý và sự phân tích nghĩa tố. Bài 4: Trình bày cấu trúc nghĩa của câu, vai trò của ý nghĩa và các quan hệ về ý trong câu. Bài 5: Trình bày nghĩa của các phát ngôn, các hành vi ngôn ngữ, hành động xuyên ngôn, lực tại ngôn, tiền giả định, các hàm ngôn và các chỉ tố trong các phát ngôn. Tác giả trân trọng cảm ơn sự giúp đỡ của Nhà trường, Khoa Ngoại ngữ và Bộ môn Phương Pháp giảng dạy trong việc biên soạn và hoàn thành tập bài giảng Ngữ Nghĩa học. Tuy nhiên, tập bài giảng này chắc chắn không tránh khỏi những hạn chế. Tác giả mong đón nhận những ý kiến đóng góp cho tập bài giảng ngày càng hoàn thiện hơn.
ThS Hoàng Thị Xuân
ii
PREFACE
English Semantics is for third- year students who have already had to some extent enough knowledge to approach the terms and concepts in semantics. English Semantics hopefully equips the students with knowledge in theory of semantics including the knowledge of the meaning, of semantic research, which is very useful for students in teaching a language and doing a research on linguistics. English Semantics also helps the students to develop the research skills- knowing how to evaluate some theories on semantics. English Semantics looks at the issues: the basic concepts of meaning, componential analysis, the traditional methods on lexical meaning, grammatical meaning, and the explanation for polysemy, synonymy, homonymy, sense relations, propositional meaning, and sentence meaning and utterance meaning English Semantics (2 credits) includes 5 units: Unit 1: An introduction: semantics and the subject matter of semantics Unit 2: Lexical meaning Unit 3: Sense relation Unit 4: The meaning of the sentence Unit 5: Utterance meaning The author wishes to express great thanks to Tay Nguyen University‘s leaders Board, The Faculty of Foreign Language Studies, and the Teaching Methodology Division for the help and encouragement in compiling and completing the course of English Semantics. This course, however, still has some shortcomings and limitations. All comments are highly appreciated.
Hoang Thi Xuan, MA.
- 1.1. What does semantics do? TABLE OF CONTENTS iii
- 1.2. The meaning of "meaning"
- 1.3. Theories of meaning.
- 1.4. Basic notions in semantics...............................................................................................
- 1.4.1. Semantic properties
- 1.4.2. Componential analysis
- 1.4.3. Components of word meaning..................................................................................
- 1.4.4. Lexical meaning and grammatical meaning
- 1.4.5. Reference and sense................................................................................................
- 1.4.6. Predicates and Arguments
- 1.4.7. Extension and prototype
- 1.4.8. Definiteness and Deixis
- 1.4.9. Sentence and Utterance meaning............................................................................
- Questions for discussion
- Exercises
- UNIT 2: LEXICAL MEANING...............................................................................................
- 2.1. Homonymy and polysemy
- 2.1.1 Homonymy:
- 2.1.2. Polysemy
- 2.2. Synonymy
- 2.2.1. Definition:...............................................................................................................
- 2.2.2. Types:
- 2.2.3. The dominant synonym
- 2.2.4. Lexical variants and paronyms
- 2.3. Antonymy
- 2.3.1. Definition:...............................................................................................................
- 2.3.2. Types of antonyms
- 2.3.1. Gradable
- 2.3.2. Complementary / binary
- 2.3.3. Converse terms / relational opposites
- 2.3.4. Multiple incompatibles/ Taxonomic sisters............................................................
- 2.4. Semantic fields
- 2.5. Hyponymy
- 2.6. Part - Whole relationships
- 2.7. Lexical gaps
- 2.8. Empty words: Tense and Modality................................................................................
- 2.9. Naming
- Questions for discussion
- Exercises
- UNIT 3 SEMANTIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH VOCABULARY
- 3.1. Changes of meaning
- 3.1.1. Causes of semantic change
- 3.1.2. Nature of semantic change
- 3.2. Transference of meaning
- 3.2.1. Metaphor.................................................................................................................
- 3.2.2. Metonymy............................................................................................................... iv
- 3.2.3. Others
- Questions for discussion
- Exercises
- UNIT 4: THE MEANING OF THE SENTENCE
- 4.1. Proposition
- 4.2. Grammaticality, acceptability and meaningfulness
- 4.3 The semantic structure of simple declarative sentences
- 4.4. Semantic Roles and sentence semantics
- 4.4.1 Semantic roles
- 4.4.2. The semantic structure of sentences, the role of arguments and semantic roles
- 4.5. Sense relation involving sentences
- 4.5.1. Sense properties
- 4.5.2. Sense Relations involving Sentences
- Questions for discussion
- Exercises
- UNIT 5: UTTERANCE MEANING
- 5.1. Utterances and context
- 5.2. Performative and Constative utterances
- 5.3. Speech acts
- 5.3.1. Locutionary acts
- 5.3.2. Illocutionary force
- 5.3.3. Perlocution
- 5.4. Presupposition
- 5.4.1. Definition
- 5.4.2. Types of presupposition/potential presuppositions
- 5.4.3. Properties of presupposition
- 5.5. Implicatures
- Questions for discussion
- Exercises
- REFERENCES
- APPENDIX - 1. Formal semantics/ the referential theory of meaning - 2. Cognitive semantics/ mentalist theories of meaning - 3. The use theory of meaning - 4. Austin‘s five types of speech acts as follow: - 5. Exercises
UNIT 1 AN INTRODUCTION: SEMANTICS AND THE SUBJECT MATTER OF SEMANTICS
1.1. What does semantics do?
For thousands of years philosophers have been pondering the meaning of ―meaning‖; yet speakers of a language can understand what is said to them and can produce strings of words that convey meaning. Learning a language includes learning the ―agreed- upon‖ meanings of certain strings of sounds and learning how to combine these meaningful units into large units that also convey meaning. We are not free to change the meanings of these words at will, for if we did, we would be unable to communicate with anyone. Humpty Dumpty, however, was unwilling to accept this fact when he said: “There‟s glory for you!” „I don‟t know what you mean by “glory”,‟ Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don‟t till I tell you. I meant “there‟s a nice knock-down argument for you!” „But “glory” doesn‟t mean „a nice knock-down argument‟, Alice objected. „When I use a word,‟ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, „it means just what I want to choose it to mean_ neither more nor less.‟ „The question is,‟ said Alice, „whether you can make words mean so many different things_ Alice is quite right. You cannot make words mean what they do not mean. Of course, if you wish to redefine the meaning of each word as you use it, you are free to do so, but you would be making an artificial, clumsy use of language, and most people would not wait around long to talk to you. A new word may be created, but it enters the language with its sound-meaning relationship already determined. Fortunately, there are few Humpty Dumpties. All the speakers of a language share the basic vocabulary__ the sounds and meanings of words. All speakers know how to combine words to produce phrase and sentence meaning. Semantics, a branch of linguistics, is the study of meaning communicated through language. Semantics is the study of meaning of words and sentences (Saeed (1997)). However, in narrow sense, semantics studies meaning in language (e.g.. The table is dirty means The definite object called table is not clean ), whereas pragmatics, another branch of linguistics analyzes meaning in language communication ( e.g_. The table is dirty_ means a description, an assertion, a complaint…).
1.2. The meaning of "meaning"
Semantics is the study of meaning. Then the question will naturally come up: ‗What is meaning?‘ The word meaning and its corresponding verb mean was once the focus of a great deal of discussion among linguists interested in semantics. C.K. Ogden
Let us now look at another sense of this verb. If one says (5) She didn‟t really mean what she said, one is assigning intentionally to the English word. It might be argued, however, that there is an essential, though indirect, connection between what people mean or intend and what the words that they use are conventionally held to mean. The word mean can be applied to people who use language, i.e. to speakers (and authors), in roughly the sense of ‗intend‘. And it can be applied to words and sentences in a different sense, roughly expressed as ‗be equivalent to‘. The first step in working out a theory of what meaning is, is to recognize this distinction clearly and always to keep in mind whether we are talking about what speakers mean or what words (sentences) mean.
1.3. Theories of meaning.
A THEORY is a precisely specified, coherent, and economical framework of interdependent statements and definitions, constructed so that as large a number of as possible of particular basic facts can either be seen to follow from it or be describable in terms of it. Mark each of the following statements true (T) or false (F)
1. Alive means the opposite of _dead
- Buy_ has an opposite meaning from _sell
- Caesar is and_ is not meaningful English sentence 4. Caesar is a prime number is nonsensical 5. Caesar is a man is nonsensical 6. Both of John‟s parents are married to aunts of mine is in a sense contradictory, describing an impossible situation 7. If the sentence John killed Bill is true of any situation, then so is the sentence Bill is alive. 8. If someone says, ―Can you pass the salt?‖ he is normally not asking about the hearer‘s ability to pass the salt, but requesting the hearer to pass the salt. 9. If someone says, ―I tried to buy some rice‖, his hearer would normally infer that he had actually failed to buy rice. Each of the true statements here (and the negation of the false ones) is a statement of some particular basic fact falling within the scope of semantics.
- The referential (or denotational approach) basically says that the meaning of an expression is what it refers to, or denotes, or stands for. ―Table‖ refers to either the general class of tables or the essential property which they all share.
- The ideational or mentalistic theory says that the meaning of an expression is the idea, or concept associated with it in the mind of anyone who knows and understands the expression. a) a word may have a notion for its referent and every word may evoke a general idea, a notion without directly referring to any particular element of reality. b) notions are always emotionally neutral while meaning are not. c) the absence or regular one-to-one correspondence between meaning and notion is clearly seen in words belonging to some specific stylistic layer.
- The behaviourist theory says that the meaning of an expression is either the stimulus that evokes it or the response that it evokes, or a combination of both, on particular occasions of utterance.
- The meaning-in- use theory says the meaning of an expression is determined by, if not identical with, its use in the language. Don‘t look for the meaning of a word (expression), look for its use.
- The truth-conditional theory says the meaning of an expression is its contribution to the truth-condition of the sentence containing it (what conditions must exist for a sentence to be true: John Smith is unmarried. We do not need to know who Smith is, but we need to know what conditions the world must satisfy for this proposition to be true.
1.4. Basic notions in semantics
1.4.1. Semantic properties
Words and morphemes have meanings. Suppose someone said: The assassin was stopped before he got to Mr. Thwacklehurst. If the word assassin is in your mental dictionary, you know that it was some person who was prevented from murdering some important person named Thwacklehurst. Your knowledge of the meaning of assassin tells you that it was not an animal that tried to kill the man and that Thwacklehurst was not likely to be a little old man who owned a tobacco shop. In other words, your knowledge of the meaning of assassin includes knowing that the individual to whom that word refers is a human, is a murderer, and is a killer of important people. These pieces of information then are some of the semantics properties of the word upon which speakers of the language agree. The meaning of all nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs_ ‗the content words‘_ and even some of the ‗function words‘ such as with or over can at least partially be specified by such properties. The same semantic property may be part of the meaning of many different words. ―Female‖ is a semantic property that helps to define tigress hen actress maiden doe mare debutante widow
1.4.2. Componential analysis
Componential analysis is a way of formalizing, or making absolutely precise the sense relations that hold between words or lexemes. This method involves the analysis of sense (meaning) of words into component parts commonly referred to as semantic features or semantic properties or just sense. This process is sometimes called decomposition of the sense of the word/ lexeme. We shall start with a much used example from standard literature on semantics. The word boy, girl, man, woman all share the semantic feature of ‗human‘. From boy and man we can extract another feature –‗-male‘ and from ‗girl‘ and ‗woman‘ the feature ‗female‘ or ‗-male‘. ‗Man‘ and ‗woman‘ have in common the sense of ‗adult‘, whereas ‗girl‘ and ‗boy‘ are characterized by an absence of it. Taking these factors together, we can come up with the following table Features Man Woman Girl Boy Male + - - + Female - + + - Adult + + - - Human + + + + Thus, a man can be described as: + male, + human, + adult, and a woman as: + female + adult, +human. What is obvious is that the meaning or sense of a word may be described as a function of certain semantic features. To say it in another way, the sense of a word is determined by i) the value of the features and ii) the definition of the operation by means of which they are combined. This componential method looks promising in terms of its potential to explain the difference between items especially synonyms. Much of the draw of this method derives from the possibility of identifying such universal semantic features in the lexical structure of language. These semantic features may be classified into markers and distinguishers. The markers are descriptive of the sense, whereas the distinguishers are to distinguish between different senses. Though this distinction may prove useful in practice, it is by no means easy to tell them apart. A semantic feature may be used as a marker in a certain environment, and a distinguisher in another. For example, in contrasting woman and man, ―male‖ will be a distinguisher, whereas in comparing boy and man, this is only a marker. This componential method may be of practical value to learners of English for distinguishing between synonyms. The idea is that we can accept definition given in mono-lingual dictionaries as function of semantic properties (=features). Then the next step is to isolate the markers and distinguishers. Let us compare hire and rent and let. Our analysis yields the following results. Their definitions in the Oxford Advanced Learners‘ Dictionary (1995) are as follows: allow somebody to use something for some time in exchange for money. You usually rent for a long period of time; you let
out accommodation, buildings, or land (that is property). You hire something for a short period of time or a particular occasion. Thus we can identify the following semantic features: allow, somebody, use, time, money. These would be the markers. The distinguishing features are long, short, and property.
Features Hire Rent Let allow + + + somebody + + + use + + + money + + + long (time) - + + short (time) + - - property only
anything + + -
1.4.3. Components of word meaning
There are 4 major components of meaning: a) denotation which includes conceptual and referential meanings, denotation exists by virtue of what it refers to; b) connotation including stylistic affective, evaluative, and intensifying, is the pragmatics communicative value the words acquires by virtue of where, when, how and by whom, for what purpose and in what context it is or may be used; c) structural meaning, which is the meaning of a word acquires by virtue of its membership in a system or a set; and d) categorical meaning, which serves as a classificatory basis. 1.4.3.1. Denotation (conceptual meaning, denotative meaning or cognitive meaning) Denotation is that part of the meaning of a word or a phrase that relates it to phenomena in the real world or in a fictional or possible world. For example, the denotation of the English word bird is a two-legged, winged, egg-laying, warm- blooded creature with a beak. In a meaning system, denotative meaning may be regarded as the ―central‖ meaning or ―core‖ meaning of a lexical item. It is often equated with referential meaning and with cognitive meaning and conceptual meaning although some linguists and philosophers make a distinction between these concepts. Denotative meaning can also be defined as to be organized largely in terms of semantic features, or in another word can be thought of as to be composed by a set of semantic features which serve to identify a particular concept or entity referred to by that word. These semantic features help form the ―central‖ or ―core‖ or ―conceptual meaning‖ of a word. Thus denotation of a word man includes the following semantic
inexpensive have the same denotation, but the connotation of shoddiness which is normally carried by cheap ensures that most advertisers will avoid using it. In talking of connotation we should bear in mind the following characteristics: a. When we talk about connotation, we talk about the ―real world‖ experience we associate with the expression when we use it or hear it. Therefore, the boundary between denotative meaning and connotative meaning is coincident with that nebulous but crucial boundary between ―language‖ and the ―real world‖. b. Connotations are relatively unstable: that is, they vary considerably according to culture, historical period, and the experience of the individual. c. Connotative meaning is indeterminate and open-ended in a sense in which conceptual meaning is not. 1.4.3.3. Structural/ associative meaning include: * Reflected meaning: Reflected meaning is the meaning which arises in cases of multiple conceptual meaning, when one sense of a word forms part of our response to another sense. For example, the 40th^ President of the US and the Great Communicator both refer to Ronald Regan. The Great Communicator sound better and is more about Reagan‘s personality than his job ( the 40th^ President of the US, which sounds cool. * Collocative meaning Collocative meaning consists of the associations a word acquires on account of the meanings of words which tend to occur in its environment girl boy Pretty boy handsome man woman car flower airliner
- Associative meaning Associative meaning also is the meaning which arises because of its association with other meanings. For example: good vs. bad, buy vs. sell, hard vs. soft * Thematic meaning Thematic meaning is the kind of meaning, which is communicated by the way in which a speaker or writer organizes the message in terms of ordering, focus, and emphasis. E.g. A man is waiting in the hall vs. There is a man waiting in the hall. The dog chased the cat vs. the cat was chased by the dog. 1.4.3.4. Categorical meaning Actually categorical meaning is one part of grammatical meaning which words derive from being a member of one category rather than another ( nouns rather than
verbs and so on). Words fall into such categories as Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives, Prepositions, Conjunctions, etc..
1.4.4. Lexical meaning and grammatical meaning
It is common knowledge that the words of a language are traditionally classified into full words and empty words. Empty words belong to a side variety of so-called form classes, which are defined in terms of their syntactic function, rather than semantically (or lexical meaning). For this reason, empty words are described as syncategorematic, i.e. as forms whose meanings and logical function derives from the way in which they combine with (syn-) major categories. The lexical meaning is the individual meaning of each word which has in the system of language. (The lexicon of a language may be thought of as a set of all the lexemes, stored in the brains of competent speakers) This meaning brings together the different forms of one and the same word lovely, lovelier, loveliest ( beautiful, attractive, pleasant, enjoyable) It will be useful to know about the distinction between the grammar of a language and its vocabulary or lexicon. These two aspects of language are complementary: every grammar presupposes a lexicon and every lexicon presupposes a grammar. The grammatical meaning may be defined as an expression in speech of relationship between words based on contrastive features of arrangements in which they occur love, hate, eat, drink (They are verbs) The grammar of a language is traditionally viewed as a system of rules which say about how lexical items are put together to form phrases, clauses and sentences or even discourses. Once these rules are flouted, the products will be described as ungrammatical. But as is clear, the grammaticality (or grammatical well- formedness) is closely related to meaningfulness. Put in another way, any grammatical formation may be meaningless if it is not meaningful. There have been a number of approaches to the grammatical analysis of natural languages. Some are morpheme-based rather than the traditional word-based: others make no distinction between clauses and sentences and use ‗sentence‘ for both. The lexicon of a language may be thought of as a set of all the lexemes, stored in the brains of competent speakers, with all the linguistic information for each lexeme that is required for the production and interpretation of the sentences of the language – rightly called mental grammar. For the time being, little is known about the mental grammar that all speakers of a language, presumably have, and in particular whether there is a clear- cut line between grammar and lexicon. However, our view is that there
d. Descriptive noun phrase: e.g. the blue book, the mean in the corner The choice of one type of referring expression rather than another seems to be based, to a large extent, on what the speaker assumes the listener. The notion ‗referring expression is not always easy to apply. The fact is that it is not clear what we mean when we say that a speaker must have a particular individual in mind in order to refer. Note that in the case of definite noun phrases also, the question of whether they are used as referring expression is very much dependent on the context and circumstances of use. For example in a situation in which John is standing alone in the corner, John and the person in the corner refer to the same individual in a conversation: John and the person in the corner have the same referent. But in a situation in which Dick does not know that John is the person in the corner, one of the two following utterances could be true and the other false: ―Dick believes that John killed Smith‖ ―Dick believes that the person in the corner killed Smith.‖ The incomplete sentence Dick believes that……. killed Smith constitutes an opaque context. An opaque context is 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 sentence with different meanings when uttered in a given situation. An equative sentence is one which is used to assert the identity of the referents of the two expressions, i.e. to assert that two referring expression have the same referent. The order of the two referring expression can be reserved without loss of acceptability. e.g. That woman over there is my daughter‟s teacher. Hanoi is the capital of Vietnam. 1.4.5.1. Sense Sense, a term used in semantics, can be understood in two ways: a- According to the German philosopher and mathematician Glottlob Frege, sense is the additional meaning. Sense is distinguished from meaning. The meaning of an expression is seen as part of the language system; whereas sense is the realization of this meaning in speech. Sense is like connotation and meaning is like denotation. b- According to many structural semanticists, the sense of a word or a phrase is the place which a word or a phrase holds in the system of semantic relationships with other words or phrases in the vocabulary of a language. There are different types of semantic relations: synonyms, antonyms… The sense of a word or phrase can be defined as its indispensable hard core of meaning. This
definition deliberately excludes any influence of context or situation of utterance on the senses of expressions. If we compare sense with reference, we can see that the referent of an expression is often a thing or a person in the world; whereas the sense of an expression is not a thing at all. In fact it is difficult to say what sort of entity the sense of an expression is. It is much easier to say whether or not two expressions have the same sense. Every expression that has meaning has sense, but not every expression has reference.
1.4.6. Predicates and Arguments
Arguments are played by the referring expressions. The 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 remainders, makes the most specific contribution to the meaning of the sentence. The predicators in sentences can be of various parts of speech: adjectives, verb, prepositions, and nouns.
- My dog bit the postman.
- Mrs. Wraith is writing the Mayor‘ speech.
- Cairo is in Africa.
- Edinburgh is between Aberdeen and York.
- This place stinks.
- John‘s car is red.
- Einstein was a genius. The parts that carry the most specific information in each underlined case: bit, write, in, between, stink, red, genius are called the predicators of these above sentences. In other reference book, the semantic analysis of sentences has been carried out by using predication analysis. A predicate is any word (or sequence of words) which (in a given single sense) can function as the predicator of a sentence. The definition of 'predicate' above contained two parenthesized conditions. The first, '(or sequence of words)', is intended to take care of examples like waif for, in front of , which are longer than one word, but which it seems sensible to analyze as single predicates. The second parenthesized condition, '(in a given single sense)‘, is more important, and illustrates a degree of abstractness in the notion of a predicate. A 'word', as we use the term can be ambiguous, i.e., can have more than one sense, but we use 'predicate' in a way which does not allow a predicate to be ambiguous. A predicate can have only one sense. Normally, the context in which we use a word will make clear what sense (what predicate) we have in mind.
A dwarf or a huge muscular body- builder could not be a prototype of the predicate man. The idea of a prototype is perhaps most useful in explaining how people learn to use (some of) the predicates in their language correctly. Predicates like man, cat, dog are often first taught to toddlers by pointing out to them typical examples of men, cat, dogs, etc. A mother may point to a cat and tell her child ―That‘s the cat‖, or point to the child‘s father and say ‗Daddy is a man‘. This kind of definition by pointing is called ostensive definition. It is very plausible to believe that a child‘s first concepts of many concrete terms are induced by ostensive definition involving a prototype. Obviously, however, not all concepts can be learned in this way. The referent of a referring expression is the thing picked out by the use of that expression on a particular occasion of utterance. The extension of a predicate is the complete set of all things which could potentially (i.e. in any possible utterance) be the referent of a referring expression whose head constituent is that predicate. A prototype of a predicate is a typical member of its extension. Reference, extension, and prototype all focus attention on the relationship between words and things. Clearly, language does not exist in a vacuum. It is used to make statements about the world outside, and these three notions are useful in an analysis of exactly how the relationship between language and the world works. (Hurford and Heasley, 1984) A stereotype of a predicate is a list of typical characteristic of things to which the predicate may be applied.
1.4.8. Definiteness and Deixis
There is a semantic difference between the following sentences: (1) The woman came to see you. (2) A woman came to see you. In (1), the speaker assumes that the hearer is able to identify which woman is in question, while no such assumption is made in (2). (Reference is investigated in Pragmatics). Language is used to talk about the real world, and can be used to talk about an infinite variety abstraction, and even of entities in imaginary, unreal world. Universe of Discourse is the particular world, real or imaginary (or part real, part imaginary) that the speaker assumes he is talking about at the time. In the course of utterances, speakers use referring expressions to refer to entities which may be concrete or abstract, real or fictitious. The predicates embedded in a referring expression help the hearer to identify its referent.
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. Most words mean what they mean regardless of who uses them, and when and where they are used. Indeed this is exactly why words are so useful. Nevertheless all languages do contain small sets of words whose meanings vary systematically according to who uses them, and where and when they are used. These words are called deictic words: the general phenomenon of their occurrence is called deixis. The word deixis is from a Greek word meaning pointing. A deictic word is one which takes some element of its meaning from the situation (i.e. the speaker, the address, the time and the place) of the utterance in which it is used. The first person singular pronoun is deictic. For example when Ben Heasley says ‗I‘ve lost the contract‘, the word I here refers to Ben Hearsley. When Penny carter says 'I‘ll send another one‘, the I here refers to Penny Carter. Proper names as well expressions such as this person, that man, these women, those men are deictic words for they require pragmatic information in order for the listener to make a ‗referential connection‘ and understand what is meant. The above examples illustrate person deixis. They also show that the use of demonstrative articles like this, that is deictic. There is also time deixis and place deixis. The following examples are all deictic expression of time: now then tomorrow this time that time seven days ago two weeks from now last week next April In order to understand what specific times such expressions refer to, we need to know when the utterance was said.. Clearly, next week has a different reference when uttered today than a month from today. Expressions of place deixis require contextual information about the place of the utterance, as shown by the following examples: here there this place that place this shop those towers over there this city these parks The verb come has a deictic ingredient because it contains the notion ―toward the speaker‘.
1.4.9. Sentence and Utterance meaning
A sentence is a grammatically complete string of word expressing a complete thought.
