Utterance , Sent , Prop

1. SEMANTICS
An Introduction: LN300

2. SEMANTICS
•Semantics (literally significant in ancient Greek) is
the study of meaning communicated through
language.
•It might be more accurate to define semantics as
the study of the relationship between linguistic
form and meaning.
•This relationship is clearly rule-governed, just as
other aspects of linguistic structure are.

3. WORD MEANING AND
SENTENCE MEANING

4. WORD MEANING AND SENTENCE MEANING
• Knowing a language involves knowing thousands of words.
• Some linguists call the mental store of these words a lexicon,
making a parallel with the lists of words and meanings published
as dictionaries.
• In this view, the mental lexicon is a large but finite body of
knowledge, part of which must be semantic.
• This lexicon is not completely static because we are continually
learning and forgetting words.
• At any one time we hold a large amount of semantic knowledge
in our memory.

5. PHRASES AND SENTENCES VS. WORDS
• Phrases and sentences have meaning, but an
important difference between word meaning on the
one hand, and phrase and sentence meaning on the
other, concerns productivity.
• It is always possible to create new words, but this is a
relatively infrequent occurrence.
• On the other hand, speakers regularly create sentences
that they have never used or heard before, confident
that their audience will understand them.

6. REFERENCE AND SENSE

7. REFERENCE AND SENSE
• One important point made by the linguist Ferdinand
de Saussure (1974) is that the meaning of linguistic
expressions derives from two sources: the language
they are part of and the world they describe.
• Words stand in a relationship to the world, or our
mental classification of it: they allow us to identify
parts of the world and make statements about them.

8. • Thus if a speaker says He saw Paul or She bought a dog, the
underlined nominals allow her to identify, pick out, or refer to
specific entities in the world.
• The relationship by which language hooks onto the world is
usually called reference.
• The semantic links between elements within the vocabulary
system is an aspect of their sense or meaning.

9. SENTENCE, UTTERANCE,
PROPOSITION

10. UTTERANCE
• Definition:
• An utterance is any stretch of talk, by one person, before and after
which there is silence on the part of that person.
• It is the use by a particular speaker, on a particular occasion, of a
piece of language
• Example: ‘Hello’, ‘Not much’ are utterances.
• Where as,‘Pxgotmgt’ and ‘Schplotzenpflaaaaaaargh!’ are not
utterances because these strings of sounds is not from any
language.

11. • Utterances may consist of a single word, a single phrase or a single sentence.
They may also consist of a sequence of sentences.
• It is not unusual (usual) to find utterances that consist of one or more
grammatically incomplete sentence-fragments.
• In short, there is no simple relation of correspondence between utterances and
sentences’
• Utterances are physical events.
• Events are ephemeral (Lasting for a markedly brief time) , located in space and
time (as events like to be).
• Utterances relate a particular accent
• They involve two “participants” – an agent who produces a linguistic object
and that linguistic object itself.

12. THE ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN
SENTENCES AND UTTERANCES
• sentences are abstract, not tied to contexts, whereas utterances are identified
by their contexts.
• This is also the main way of distinguishing between semantics and pragmatics.
• If you are dealing with meaning and there is no context to consider, then you
are doing semantics, but if there is a context to be brought into consideration,
then you are engaged in pragmatics.
• Pragmatics is the study of utterance meaning. Semantics is the study of
sentence meaning and word meaning.

13. SENTENCE
• Definition: A sentence is not a physical event.
• 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 given sentence always consists of the same words, and in the same order. Any
change in the words, or in their order, makes a different sentence, for our
purposes.
• Example:
• Helen rolled up the carpet
• Helen rolled the carpet up (Different sentences)
• a)Sincerity may frighten the boy
• b)Sincerity may frighten the boy(Same sentences)

14. • It would make sense to say that an utterance was in a particular accent (i.e. a
particular way of pronouncing words).
• However, it would not make strict sense to say that a sentence was in a particular
accent, because a sentence itself is only associated with phonetic characteristics
such as accent and voice quality through a speaker’s act of uttering it.
• Accent and voice quality belong strictly to the utterance, not to the sentence
uttered.
• A sentence is a grammatically complete string of words expressing a complete
thought.
• Example:
• I would like a cup of coffee is a sentence.
• Coffee, please is not a sentence.

15. PROPOSITION
• Definition: A proposition is that part of the meaning of the utterance, of a
declarative sentence which describes some state of affairs.
• The state of affairs typically involves people or things referred to by expressions in
the sentence and the situation or action they are involved in.
• In uttering a declarative sentence a speaker typically asserts a proposition.
• It contains predicate(Aspect of entity, quality, state, activity, relation with other
entity/ things)+Argument(entity,some sort of thing).
• The notion of truth can be used to decide whether two sentences express different
propositions.
• True propositions correspond to facts, in the ordinary sense of the word fact. False
propositions do not correspond to facts.

16. • One can entertain propositions in the mind regardless of
whether they are true or false, e.g. by thinking them, or
them. But only true propositions can be known.
• Example:If John wonders whether Alice is deceiving him, would it
seem reasonable to say that he has the proposition that Alice is
deceiving him in his mind, and is not sure whether it is a true or a
false proposition? Yes / No

17. • A‘proposition’ can be declarative sentences, interrogatives, which are used to ask
questions, and imperatives, which are used to convey orders.
• Normally, when a speaker utters a simple declarative sentence, he commits himself
to the truth of the corresponding proposition: i.e. he asserts the proposition.
• By uttering a simple interrogative or imperative, a speaker can mention a
particular proposition, without asserting its truth.
• Example In saying, ‘John can go’ a speaker asserts the proposition that John can
go.
• In saying, ‘Can John go?’, he mentions the same proposition but merely questions
its truth.

18. A comparative study
Utterance Sentences propositions
Can be loud or quiet + - -
Can be grammatical or not + + -
Can be true or false + + +
In a particular regional
accent
+ - -
In a particular language + + -