MIDTERM PROJECT OF LINGUISTIC MODULE 2

I. Word meaning, sentence meaning, utterence meaning:

1. Sentence meaning (or word meaning) is what a sentence (or word) means.

Ex: A bachelor is unmarried man.

- A sentence is neither a physical event nor a physical project. It is,

conceived abstractly, a complete string of words put together by the
grammatical rules of a language expressing a complete thought.

Ex: Utterance of non-sentences: “ Mine” , “You” , “John” ,….

- A sentence can be thought of as the IDEAL string of words behind various

realizations in utterances and inscriptions. It doesn’t make sense to talk of
the time and place of sentence.

Ex: I am a student at Quang Trung School.

I am doing exercises at home.

- The same sentence must have the same words in the same order, if there is
any change in the words or orders, then makes a different sentence.

Ex: He rolled up the carpet – He rolled the carpet up ( different sentences)

He rolled the carpet up – He rolled the carpet up ( same sentences ).

2. An utterance is any strectch of talk, by one person, before and after which
there is silence on the part of that person. (without pauses for long sentences)

- 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. It makes sense to talk of the time and place of an utterance. Accent
and voice quality belong strictly to the utterance,not to the sentence uttered.
Ex: Say sentence for the first time “I am a student” => 1 utterance, say twice => 2
utterance and so on.

If we say we say just 1 sentence “I am a student” in 5 different people

=> there will be 5 utterances.

3. 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 persons or things referred to by expression

in the sentence and the situation or action they are involved in. In uttering a
declarative sentence a speaker typically asserts a proposition. By uttering a simple
interrogative or imperative, a speaker can metion a particular proposition without
assert its truth.

Ex: “John can go” a speaker assert a proposition that John can go.

But “Can John go?” just have the same proposition and merely questions its truth.

- True propositions correspond to facts, in the ordinary sense of the word fact.
False proposition do not correspond to facts.

Ex: Grass is green.

- One can entertain proposition in the mind regardless of whether they are true or
false, e.g by thinking them or believing them. But only true proposition can be
know.

Ex: If I say to you, “If Mary came to the party, Henry must have been upset”, I
thereby put in your mind the proposition that Mary came to the party without
necessarily indicating whether it is true or not.

- Sentences in different languages can correspond to the same proposition, if the

two sentences are perfect translations of each other.
II. Reference and sense:

Sense versus reference

The relationships inside the The relationships between

languages. language and the world.

1. Reference, by means of reference, a speaker indicates which things in the

world (including persons) are being talked about. Reference is the relationship
between parts of the language and things outside the language (in the world).

Ex: “My son is in the beech tree”

Identifies person identifies thing

- One expression may have variable reference.

Ex: left hand as there are people in the world with left hand.

- Some expressions may have constant reference.

Ex: The People’s Republic of China.

-Two or more different expressions can have the same referent.

Ex: The Morning Star and the Evening Star, both of them refer to the planet
Venus.

2. The sense of an expression is its place in a system of semantic relationships

with other expressions in the language. We can talk about the sense, not only of
words, but also of longer expressions such as phrases and sentences.
- A word can have more than one sense.

Ex: a bank of the river, the bank of Vietnam, …

- A sentense can also have more than one sense.

Ex: A chicken is ready to eat => (1): The chicken is ready to be eaten.

(2): The chicken is ready to eat something.

* The relationship between sense and reference: the referent of an expression is

often a thing or a person in the world; whereas the sense of an expression in not
a thing at all.

- Every expression that has meaning has sense, but not every expression has
reference.

Ex: almost, if, above, and, probable,…

- To the extent that perfect translation between languages is possible ( and this is
a very debatable point), essentially the same sense can be said to belong to
expression in different languages.

- Different dialects of one language may also have the same sense.

3. 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.

Ex: The name Fred in an utterance such as ‘Fred hit me’, where the speaker has a
particular person in mind when he says ‘Fred’, is a referring expression.

Fred in ‘There’s no Fred at this address’ is not a referring expression,

because in this case a speaker would not have a particular person in mind in
uttering the word.

- The referent of a referring expression is the thing picked out by the use of that
expression on a particular occasion of utterance.
- Indefinite noun phrases may or may not be a referring expression.

Ex: forty buses in ‘This engine has the power of forty buses’.

- Definite noun phrases frequently are mostly used as referring expression:

+ Proper names: John, Peter, Alex,…

+ Personal nouns (pronouns): he, it, she,…

+ Longer descriptive expressions: the man who shot Abraham Lincoln, the girl
standing in front of the class,…

* But even with definite noun phrases, there are examples show they are not
clearly referring expressions:

Ex: he in ‘If anyone ever marries Nancy, he’s in for a bad time’ ( the speaker has
no particular individual in mind as Nancy’s possible future husband.

4. 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.

Ex: The first person singular pronoun I is deictic, when Ben Heasley says ‘ I’ve lost
the contract’ and the word I here refers to Ben Heasley.

III. SENSE RELATION BETWEEN WORDS:

1. Synonymy is the relationship between two predicates that have the same
sense. (at least one sense in common)

Ex: stubborn and obstinate, big and large, loyal and faithful,….

- Synonymy is a relation between predicates, not between words.

Ex: hide1 (intransitive): Let’s hide from Mummy.

hide2 ( transitie): Hide your sweeties under the pillow.

2. Antonymy has a traditional view that it is simply ‘oppositeness of meaning’.

Ex: hot vs cold, thick vs thin, dead vs alive,….

- Binary antonyms ( complementarity) are predicates which come in pairs and

between them exhaust all the relevant possibilities. If the one predicate is
applicable, then the other cannot be and vice versa.

Ex: dead and alive, true and false,…

- If a predicate describes a relationship between two things ( or people) and some

other predicate describes the same relationship when two things (or people) are
mentioned in the opposite order, then the two predicates are CONVERSES of each
other.

Ex: parents and child ( because X is the parent of Y(one order) describes the same
situation(relationship) as Y is the child of X(opposite order) )

Below and above, own and belong to,….

- Multiple incompatibility (a) all the terms in a given system and (b) together, the
members of a system cover all the relevant area.

Ex: the vehicle system like car, bus, train,…

The animal system like bat, bear, tiger,…

- Two predicates are GRADABLE ANTONYMS if they are a opposite ends of a

continuous scale of values ( a scalef which typically varies according to the context
of use).

Ex: hot and cold is a continuos scale of values, which may be given names such as
warm, cool, tepid.

Tall and short, clever and stupid,…..

3. 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.

Ex: The meaning of red is included in the meaning of scarlet. ( Red is the
superordinate term and scarlet is a hyponym of red, scarlet is a kind of red).

- Define hyponymy in such a way that synonymy counts as a special case of

hyponymy .

Ex: mercury and quicksilver ( Symmetrical hyponymy )

- If X is a hyponymy of Y and if Y is also a hyponymy of X, then X and Y are

synonymous.

4. Homonymy is one of an ambiguous word whose different senses are far apart
from each other and not obviously related to each other in any way with respect
to a native speaker’s intuition.

Ex: mug ( drinking vessel ) or mug (gullible person)

5. Polysemy is one where a word has several very closely related senses. In other
words, a native speaker of the language has clear intuitions that the different
senses are related to each other in some way.

Ex: mouth ( of the river ) or mouth ( of an animal )

IV. SENSE RELATION BETWEEN SENTENCES:

1. A generic sentence is a sentence in which some statement is made about a
whole unrestricted class of invidiuals, as opposed to any particular individual.

Ex: The whale is a mammal (understood in the most usual way)

A wasp makes its nest in a hole in a tree.

- Note that generic sentence can be introduced by either a or the ( or neither).

2. 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. Equative sentence can be false.

Ex: That woman over there is my daughter’s teacher.

Henry the Eight is the current President of the USA.

*Cairo is the large city ( not an equative sentence because it doesn’t state identity
of reference)

- A feature of many equative sentence is that the order of the two referring
expressions can be reversed without loss of acceptability.

Ex: The largest city in Africa is Cairo.

Cairo is the largest city in Africa.

3. 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.

Ex: All cats are animal.

Bachelors are unmarried.

4. A synthetic sentence is one which is NOT analytic, but may be either true or
false, depending on the way the world is (circumstances)

Ex: John is from Ireland. ( There is nothing in the senses of John or Ireland or from
which makes this neccesarily true or false)

Cats never live more than 20 years.

5. A contradictory sentence ( 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.

Ex: This animal is a vegetable.

That girl is her own mother’s mother.

- Analytic sentences can be formed from contradictions and vice versa, by the
insertion or removal, as appropriate, of the negative particle word not.

6. An ambiguous sentence is when it has more than one sense, a sentense is

ambiguous if it has two (or more) paraphrases which are not themselves
paraphrases of each other.

Ex: We saw her duck is a paraphrase of We saw her lower her head and of We
saw the duck belonging to her, and these last two sentences are not paraphrases
of each other. Therefore We saw her duck is ambiguous.

7. 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).

Ex: Bachelorss prefer redhaired girls is a paraphrase of Girls with red hair are
preferred by unmarried men.

John is the parent of James and James is the child of John.

8. The notion of hyponymy, which involves meaning inclusion between individual

predicate, can be extended to a particular kind of meaning inclusion between
propositions in a language involving truth called ENTAILMENT.

- A sentence expressing proposition X entails a sentence expressing proposition Y

if the truth of Y follows necessarily from the truth of X.

Ex: John ate all the kippers (X) entails Someone ate something (Y).

John killed Bill (X) entails Bill died (Y)

- It is not possible to think of any circumstances in which sentence X is true and
sentence Y false.

- Entailment applies cumulatively. Thus if X entails Y, Y entails Z, then X entails Z.

Ex: X, Some boys ran down the street entails Y, Some kids ran down the street

Y, Some kids ran down the street entails Z, Some kids went down the street

Therefore: X, Some boys ran down the street entails Z, Some kids went down the
street.

- 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.

Ex: John and Mary are twins entails Mary and John are twins

Mary and John are twins entails John and Mary are twins

Therefore: John and Mary are twins is a paraphrase of Mary and John are twins.