PAPPER
SYNTAX
: THE MEANING OF LANGUAGE
Lecturer
:
Eliza , SS,M.Pd
by
group
: 8
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ADE PRIMA RORA
|
(2312.012)
|
|
RAHMA NELI
|
(2312.003)
|
RANI (2312.026)
ANNISA AULIA (2312.013 )
JURUSAN TARBIYAH
PROGRAM STUDI
PENDIDIKAN
BAHASA INGGRIS
SEKOLAH TINGGI
AGAMA ISLAM NEGERI (STAIN)
SJEH M DJAMIL
DJAMBEK BUKITTINGGI
2013/ 2014
CHAPTER
I
DISCUSSION
What do you know about meaning when you
know a language? To begin with, you know when a "word" is meaningful (flick)
or meaningless (blick), and you know when a "sentence" is
meaningful (Jack swims) or meaningless (swims metaphorical every). You
know when a word has two meanings (bear) and when a sentence has two
meanings (Jack saw a man with a telescope). You know when two words have
the same meaning (sofa and couch), and when two sentences have
the same meaning (Jack put off the meeting, Jack put the meetingoff). And
you know when words or sentences have opposite meanings (alive/dead; Jack
swims/Jack doesn't swim).
You generally know the real-world object
that words refer to like the chair in the corner; and even if the words
do not refer to an actual object, such as the unicorn behind the bush, you
still have a sense of what they mean, and if the particular object
happened to exist, you would have the knowledge to identify it. You
know, or have the capacity to discover, when sentences are true or false. That
is, if you know the meaning of a sentence, you know its truth conditions. In some cases it's obvious, or
redundant (all kings m'e male [true], all bachelors are married [false]);
in other cases you need some further, nonlinguistic knowledge(Molybdenum
conducts electricityl ), but by knowing the meaning, you know the kind of world
knowledge that is needed.
The study of the linguistic meaning of
morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences is called semantics. Subfields of
semantics are lexical semantics, which is concerned with the meanings of words,
and the meaning relationships among words; and phrasal or sentential semantics,
which is concerned with the meaning of syntactic units larger than the word.
The study of how context affects meaning-for example, how the sentence It's
cold in here comes to be interpretedas "close the windows" in
certain situations-is called pragmatics.
A.
What speakers
know about the sentence meaning
Let's begin by returning to Jack, who is
swimming in [he pool. If you are poolside and you hear the sentence Jack
swims, and you know the meaning of that sentence, then you wi ll judge the
sentence to be true. On the other hand, if you are indoors and you happen to
bel ieve that Jack never learned to swim, then when you hear the very same
sentence Jack swims, you will judge the sentence to be fa lse and you wi
ll thi nk the speaker is misin formed o r lying. More generally,if you know the
meaning of a sentence, then you can determine under what conditions it is true
or false.
You do not need to actually know whether a
sentence is t rue or false to know its mea ning. Knowing rhe meaning tells you
how to determine the truth va lue.The sentence copper collducts electricity has
meaning and is perfec tly understood precisely because we know how to determine
whether it's true or false.Knowing the meani ng of a sentence, then, means
knowing under what ci rcumstances it would be true or false according to your
knowledge of the world, namely its truth conditions. Reducing the question of
meaning (0 the question of truth conditions has proved to be very fr uitful in
understanding the semantic properties of language.
For most sentences it docs not make sense (0
say that they arc always true
or always fa lse. Rather, they are true or fa
lse in a given situation, as we previously
saw with Jack swims. But a restricted
number of sentences arc indeed
always true regard less of the circumsta
nces. They are called tautologies. (Theterm analytic is also used for such
sentences.) Examples of tautologies are sentenceslike Circles are round or
A persall who is sillgle is 1I0t married. Their truth is gua ranteed
solely by the meaning of their parts and the way they are put togerher.
Similarly, some sentences arc always fa lse. T hese a rc called
contradictions.Exampl es of contrad ictions a rc sentences like Circles are
square or Abacbelor is married.
1.
Entailment and Related Notions
If you know that the sentence Jack swims
beat/tift/fly is t rue, then you a lso
know that the sentence Jack swims must
a lso be true. This meaning relation is called entailment. We say that Jack
swims beautifully ent ails Jack swims. More generally, one sentence
entai ls another if whenever the first sentence is true the second one is also
true, in a ll conceivable ci rcumstances.Generally,entailment goes on ly in one
direction. So while rhe sentencc Jack swims beautifully entails Jack
swims, the reverse is not tr ue. Knowing merely that Jack swims is true does not
necessitate the truth of Jack swims beautifully. Jack could be a poor
swimmer. On the other hand, negating both sentences reverses the entailment. Jack
doesn't swim entails Jack doesn't swim beautifully.
Two sentences are synonymous if they
entail each other.
Thus
if sentence A entails sentence B and vice versa, then whenever A is true B is
true, and vice versa. Although entailment says nothing specifically about false
sentences, it's clear that if sentence A entails sentence B, then whenever B is
false, A must be false. (If A were true, B would have to be true.) And if B also
entails A, then whenever A is false, B would have to be false. Thus mutual entailment
guarantees identical truth values in all situations; the sentences are synonymous.
Two sentences are contradictory if,
whenever one is true, the other is false or, equivalently, there is no
situation in which they are both true or both false. For example, the sentences
Jack is alive and Jack is dead are contradictory because if the
sentence Jack is alive is true, then the sentence Jack is dead is
false, and vice versa. In other words, Jack is alive and Jack is dead
have opposite truth values. Like synonymy, contradiction can be reduced to
a special case of entailment.
Two sentences
are contradictory if one entails the negation of the other.
For instance, Jack
is alive entails the negation of Jack is dead, namely Jack
is not dead. Similarly, Jack
is dead entails the negation of Jack is alive, namely
Jack
is not alive. The
notions of contradiction (always false) and contradictory (opposite
in truth value) are related in that if two sentences are contradictory,
their conjunction with and is a contradiction. Thus Jack is
alive and Jack is dead is a contradiction;it cannot be true under any
circumstances.
2.
Ambiguity
The boy saw the man with a telescope was an instance
of structural ambiguity. It is ambiguous because it can mean that the boy saw
the man by using a telescope or that the
boy saw the man who was holding a telescope. The sentence is structurally
ambiguous because it is associated with two different phrase structures, each
corresponding to a different meaning. Here are the two structures
(1) S
NP VP
Det N VP PP
The
boy V NP P NP
Saw det N with
det N
The man a telescope
(2). S
NP
VP
Det N V NP
The boy saw NP PP
Det N
P NP
The man
with Det N
a
telescope
B.
Compositional Semantics
a.
Semantic Rules
Our
semantic rules must be sensitive not only to the meaning of individual
words but to the
structure in which they occur. Taking as an example our simple
sentence Jack
swims, let us see how the semantic rules compute its meaning. Themeanings
of the individual words are summarized as follows:
Word Meaning
Jack refers to (or
means) the individual Jack
Swims
refers to (or
means) the set of individuals that Swim
The phrase
structure tree for our sentence is as follows:
s
NP NP
Jack
swims
Semantic Rule I
The meaning of [s NP VP] is the
following truth condition: If the meaning of NP (an individual) is a member of
the meaning of VP (a set of individuals), then S is TRUE, otherwise it is FALSE
Rule I states that a sentence composed
of a subject NP and a predicate VP is true if the subject NP refers to an
individual who is among the members of the set that constitute the meaning of
the VP. This rule is entirely general; it does not refer to any particular
sentence, individuals, or verbs. It works equally well for sentences like Ellen
sings or Max barks. Thus the meaning of Max barks is the truth
condition (i.e., the "if-sentence") that states that the sentence is
true if the individual denoted by Max is among the set of barking individuals.
complex case: the sentence Jack
kissed Laura. The main syntactic difference between this example and the
previous one is that we now have a transitive verb that requires an
extra NP in object position; otherwise our semantic rules will derive
the meaning using the same mechanical procedure as in the first example, the word meaning
and syntactic structure:
word Meaning
Jack refers to (or means) the
individual Jack
Laura refers to (or means) the individual Laura
kissed refers to (or
means) the set of pairs of individuals X and Y such
that X kissed Y.
Here
is the phrase structure tree.
S
NP VP
V NP
jack
kissed laura
The meaning of the transitive verb kiss
is still a set, but this time a set of pairs of individuals. The meaning of
the VP, however, is still a set of individuals, namely those individuals who
kissed Laura.
Semantic Rule II
The meaning of [vp V NP] is the set of
individuals X such that X is the first member of any pair in the meaning of V
whose second member is the meaning of NP. The meaning of the sentence is
derived by first applying Semantic Rule II, which establishes the meaning of
the VP as a certain set of individuals, namely those who kissed Laura.
These rules, and many more like them,
account for our knowledge about the truth value of
sentences by taking the meanings of words and combining them according
to the syntactic structure of the sentence. It is easy to see from these examples
how ambiguous meanings arise. Because the meaning of a sentence is computed
based on its hierarchical organization, different trees will have different meanings-structural
ambiguity-even when the words are the same, as in
the
example The boy saw the man with a telescope. The occurrence of an
ambiguous word-lexical ambiguity-when it combines
with the other elements of a sentence, can
make the entire sentence ambiguous, as in She can't bear children. The
semantic theory of sentence meaning that we just sketched is not the only
possible one, and it is also incomplete, as shown by the paradoxical sentence This
sentence is false. The
sentence cannot be true, else it's false; it cannot be
false, else it's true. Therefore it has no truth value, though it certainly has meaning.
This notwithstanding, compositional truth-conditional semantics has proven
to be an extremely powerful and useful tool for investigating the semantic properties
of natural languages.
When
Compositionality Goes Awry
interesting cases in which
compositionality breaks down, either because there is a problem with words or
with the semantic rules. If one or more words in a sentence do not have a
meaning, then obviously we will not be able to compute a meaning for the entire
sentence. Moreover,even if the individual words have meaning but cannot be
combined together as required by the syntactic structure and related semantic
rules, we will also not get to meaning. We refer to these situations as
semantic anomaly. Alternatively, it might require a lot of creativity and
imagination to derive a meaning. This is what happens in metaphors. Finally, some
expressions-called idioms-have a fixed meaning, that is, a meaning that is not
compositional. Applying compositional rules to idioms gives rise to funny or
inappropriate meanings.
CONCLUTIONS
A.
What speakers know about the
sentence meaning
Let's begin by returning to Jack, who is
swimming in [he pool. If you are poolside and you hear the sentence Jack
swims, and you know the meaning of that sentence, then you wi ll judge the
sentence to be true. On the other hand, if you are indoors and you happen to
bel ieve that Jack never learned to swim, then when you hear the very same
sentence Jack swims, you will judge the sentence to be fa lse and you wi
ll thi nk the speaker is misin formed o r lying. More generally,if you know the
meaning of a sentence, then you can determine under what conditions it is true
or false.
Entailment and Related Notions
If you know that the sentence Jack swims
beat/tift/fly is t rue, then you a lso
know that the sentence Jack swims must
a lso be true. This meaning relation is called entailment. We say that Jack
swims beautifully ent ails Jack swims. More generally, one sentence entai
ls another if whenever the first sentence is true the second one is also true,
in a ll conceivable ci rcumstances.Generally,entailment goes on ly in one
direction. So while rhe sentencc Jack swims beautifully entails Jack
swims, the reverse is not tr ue. Knowing merely that Jack swims is true does not
necessitate the truth of Jack swims beautifully. Jack could be a poor
swimmer. On the other hand, negating both sentences reverses the entailment. Jack
doesn't swim entails Jack doesn't swim beautifully.
Compositional
Semantics
Semantic Rules
Our
semantic rules must be sensitive not only to the meaning of individual
words but to the
structure in which they occur. Taking as an example our simple
sentence Jack swims, let
us see how the semantic rules compute its meaning. Themeaning
REFERENCES
Yule ,george .2006. the study of language . Cambrigde
university press
Davidson, D., and G. Harman, eds.
1972. Semantics of natural languages. Dordrecht,
The Netherlands: Reidel.
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