WEEK 8:

Propositions, Utterances and

Sentences
 CONTENT

1. Multiple Incompatibility
2. Utterances & Utterance
meaning
3. Sentences and Propositions

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 SENSE RELATIONS-ANTONYMY

ANTONYMY
• In a traditional view, antonymy is simply
‘oppositeness of meaning’.
• This view is not adequate, as words may
be opposite in meaning in different ways,
and some words have no real opposites.

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 SENSE RELATIONS-
ANTONYMY
Practice: Quickly, what would you say are the opposites
of the following words?
(1) hot ______________
cold
(2) thick ______________
thin However, hot is not the
opposite of cold in the
(3) buy ______________
sell same way as borrow is
(4) lend ______________
borrow the opposite of lend.
(5) male ______________ Thick is not the
female opposite of thin in the
(6) dead ______________
alive same way as dead is
(7) lunch ______________ the opposite of alive.
(8) liquid ______________
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 SENSE RELATIONS-
ANTONYMY
ANTONYMY
• Antonymy is also called semantic
incompatibility.
• There are four basic types of antonymy:
1. Binary antonymy(sometimes also called
complementarity)
2. Converses
3. Multiple incompatibility
4. Gradable antonymy
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 SENSE RELATIONS-BINARY
ANTONYMY
1. BINARY ANTONYMY
Definition
BINARY ANTONYMS 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. Another way to
view this is to say that a predicate is a binary
antonym of another predicate if it entails the
negative of the other predicate.

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 SENSE RELATIONS-BINARY
ANTONYMY
Example:
true and false are binary antonyms.
If a sentence is true, it cannot be false. If it
is false, it cannot be true.
Alternatively, if something is true, this
entails that it is not false. If it is false, this
entails it is not true.
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 SENSE RELATIONS-BINARY
ANTONYMY
Practice: Are the following pairs of
predicates binary antonyms?
(1) chalk – cheese
(2) same – different
(3) copper – tin
(4) dead – alive
(5) married – unmarried
(6) love – hate
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 SENSE RELATIONS-BINARY
ANTONYMY
Sometimes two different binary
antonyms can combine in a set of
predicates to produce a four-way
contrast.
Example:
Male Female
Adult Man Woman
No-adult Boy Girl
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 SENSE RELATIONS-BINARY
ANTONYMY
Sometimes two different binary
antonyms can combine in a set of
predicates to produce a four-way
contrast.
Example:
Male Female
Married Husband Wife
Unmarried Bachelor Spinster
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 SENSE RELATIONS-
CONVERSENESS
2. CONVERSES
Definition
If a predicate describes a relationship between
two things (or people) and some other predicate
describes the same relationship when the two
things (or people) are mentioned in the opposite
order, then the two predicates are converses of
each other.

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 SENSE RELATIONS-
CONVERSENESS
Example:
Parent and child are converses, because X
is the parent of Y (one order) describes the
same situation (relationship) as Y is the
child of X (opposite order).

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 SENSE RELATIONS-
CONVERSENESS
Practice: Are the following pairs of
expressions converses?
(1) below – above
(2) grandparent – grandchild
(3) love – hate
(4) conceal – reveal
(5) greater than – less than
(6) own – belong to
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 SENSE RELATIONS-
CONVERSENESS
The notion of converseness can be applied
to examples in which three things (or
people) are mentioned.
The case of buy and sell is one such
example.
If John bought a car from Fred, is it the
case that Fred sold a car to John.
(relationship between Fred, John and car
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 SENSE RELATIONS-
CONVERSENESS
Practice
(1) Are borrow and lend converses?
- Yes, if X borrows something from Y, Y lends that
thing to X.
(2) Are give and take converses?
- No, if X takes something from Y, Y does not
necessarily give that thing to X (for example, X might
take it without Y’s permission).
(3) Are come and go converses?
- No, if Mohammed goes to the mountain, the mountain
does not come to Mohammed. 15
 SENSE RELATIONS
• In both types of binary antonymy and
converseness, the antonyms come in
pairs. Between them, the members of a
pair of binary antonyms fully fill the area
to which they can be applied. Such areas
can be thought of as miniature semantic
systems. Such semantic systems are
sometimes known as ‘semantic fields’.
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 SENSE RELATIONS
• Thus, for example, male and female
between them constitute the English sex
system, true and false are the two
members of the truth system etc. Other
such systems (or fields) can have three,
or four, or any number of members,
depending upon the way in which the
system is organized.
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SENSE RELATIONS-Practice
(1) What would you call the system of oppositions to
which the words Spring and Summer both belong?
- ‘season system’
(2) How many members does this system have
altogether?
- Four
(3) What would you call the system to which solid and
gas belong?
- ‘physical-state system’.
(4) How many members does this system have?
- Three: liquid, solid, and gas.
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SENSE RELATIONS-Practice
(5) Can you think of an example of a seven-member
system? (Hint: you use it every day of the week.)
- Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,
(6) Four-member systems are quite common. How
many can you think of?
- hearts, clubs, diamonds, spades; earth, air, fire, water;
North, East, South,West

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SENSE RELATIONS- MULTIPLE
INCOMPATIBILITY
3. MULTIPLE INCOMPATIBILITY
What these systems (in PRACTICE –
slides18, 19) have in common is that:
(a)all the terms in a given system are
mutually incompatible,
and (b) together, the members of a
system cover all the relevant area.
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SENSE RELATIONS- MULTIPLE
INCOMPATIBILITY
EXAMPLE:
• a playing card cannot belong to both the hearts
suit and the spades suit.
• And besides hearts, clubs, diamonds, and
spades, there are no other suits.

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SENSE RELATIONS- MULTIPLE
INCOMPATIBILITY
3. MULTIPLE INCOMPATIBILITY
Systems such as these are called systems of
multiple incompatibility.
There are large numbers of open-ended
systems of multiple incompatibility.

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SENSE RELATIONS- GRADABLE
ANTONYM
Definition
Two predicates are GRADABLE
antonyms if they are at opposite ends of a
continuous scale of values (a scale which
typically varies according to the context of
use).

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SENSE RELATIONS- GRADABLE
ANTONYM
Example: Hot and cold are gradable antonyms.
Between hot and cold is a continuous scale of
values, which may be given names such as
warm, cool, or tepid.
What is called hot in one context (e.g. of oven
temperatures in a recipe book) could well be
classed as cold in another context (e.g. the
temperatures of stars).
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UTTERANCES- SENTENCES

Definition
An 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.
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 UTTERANCES- SENTENCES
PRACTICE: Now decide whether the following could
represent utterances.
(1) ‘Hello’
(2) ‘Not much’
(3) ‘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 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’
(4) ‘Pxgotmgt’
(5) ‘Schplotzenpflaaaaaaargh!’
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UTTERANCES- SENTENCES

Definition
“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.”
[Hurford and Heasley, 1984: 16]

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UTTERANCES- SENTENCES

Example:
Jane: ‘Coffee?’ ¬ Would you like some coffee?
Steve: ‘Sure!’ ¬ I’m sure to love it.
Jane: ‘White?’ ¬ Would you like (black coffee or)
white coffee?
Steve: ‘Black.’ ¬ I’d like black coffee, please.
(One-word utterances) (Well-formed
sentences)
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UTTERANCES- SENTENCES
“The distinction between sentence and
utterance is of fundamental importance to
both semantics and pragmatics.
Essentially, we want to say that a sentence
is an abstract theoretical entity defined
within a theory of grammar, while utterance
is the issuance of a sentence.” [Levinson,
1983: 18]
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UTTERANCES- SENTENCES
“Utterances of non-sentences, e.g. short phrases or
single words, are used by people in communication all
the time.
People do not converse wholly in (tokens of) well-
formed sentences. But the abstract idea of a sentence is
the basis for understanding even those expressions,
which are not sentences. In the overwhelming majority
of cases, the meaning of non-sentences can be best
analysed by considering them to be abbreviations, or
incomplete versions, of whole sentences.”
[Hurford and Heasley, 1984: 18]
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UTTERANCES- SENTENCES
“The term ‘utterance’ can be used to refer either
to the process (or activity) of uttering or to the
product of that process (or activity). Utterances
in the first of these two senses are commonly
referred to nowadays as speech acts; utterances
in the second sense may be referred to — in a
specialized sense of the term — as
inscriptions.” [Lyons, 1995: 235]

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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 persons or
things referred to by expressions in the sentence.
In uttering a declarative sentence, a speaker
typically asserts a proposition.”
[Hurford and Heasley, 1984: 19]
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SAME PROPOSITION-
DIFFERENT PROPOSITIONS
The notion of truth can be used to decide
whether two sentences express different
propositions.
Thus, if there is any conceivable set of
circumstances in which one sentence is
true, while the other is false, we can be sure
that they express different propositions.
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PROPOSITION
Ex1. The following pair of sentences
expresses the same proposition:
1(a) Harry took out the garbage.
1(b) Harry took the garbage out.
Ex2. The following pair of sentences
expresses different propositions:
2(a) Isobel loves Tony.
2(b) Tony loves Isobel.
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PROPOSITION
Ex3. The following pair of sentences
expresses the same proposition:
3(a) John gave Mary a book.
3(b) Mary was given a book by John.
Ex4. The following pair of sentences
expresses different propositions:
4(a) George danced with Ethel.
4(b) George didn’t dance with Ethel.
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TRUE PROPOSITIONS-FALSE
PROPOSITIONS
True propositions correspond to facts, in the
ordinary sense of the word “fact”.
False propositions do not correspond to
facts.
Examples:
- There are lions in Africa. (a true
proposition)
- The state of Arkansas is uninhabited by
human beings. (a false proposition) 36
PROPOSITIONAL CONTENT
Corresponding declaratives and
interrogatives
(and imperatives) have the same
propositional content.
Examples:
‘John can go’ , ‘Can John go?’, and “ John,
go” have the same propositional content.

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Distinction between a proposition
and a sentence
“Propositions, unlike sentences, cannot be said to
belong to any particular language. Sentences in different
languages can correspond to the same proposition, if the
two sentences are perfect translations of each other.”
[Hurford and Heasley, 1984:21-22]
For example, English I’am cold, French J’ai froid,
German Mir ist kalt and Vietnamese Tôi lạnh, to the
extent to which they are perfect translations of each
other, be said to correspond to the same proposition.

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Distinction between a proposition, a
sentence and an utterance

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Distinction between a proposition, a
sentence and an utterance
Also, it is interesting to note that the same
proposition can be expressed by different
sentences and that the same sentence can be
realised by different utterances on
particular occasions.

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+ - -
+ + -
+ + +
+ - -
+ + -
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