The SentencePresented by:

Bida Javaid

Semantics

Sentence : A tool for communication.

A basic unit of meaning. An expression of complete thought.

Word: Not a basic unit of meaning

Sentence

Noun Phrase Verb Phrase

Determinant Noun Predicate/compliment

(remaining part of sentence)

Sentence : Study through syntax

(study of structure of sentence)

Through this structure we can’t produce everything. The sentence by this minimal structure

This is a chair. He is going.

‘A single word may be a sentence’

Que: What are those animals in that filed?

Ans: ‘Horse .’

Word may be a sentence if it is used as a reply to some question.

Horse one word sentence

There are horses .

Omit Ellipses Pro-formation

Reduce reputation Reduce specific word and add

in the discourse/ pronouns etc to avoid problem.

sentence.

John saw Marry and spoke to her. Omitted her Not all sentence fragments can change.

Coming? Or coming !May be used instead of ‘ are you coming ? Or I’m

coming.In actual speech we fail to produce complete grammatical

sentence due to lapse of memory.

Meaning of the sentence can be predicated from the word it contain.

Sentence (meaning)

Surface structure Deep structure I went to the bank.

Ambiguous two or more meaning.

Other kind of meaning that are not related to grammatical and lexical structure.

Kind of meaning : Meaning is understand In the spoken language carried

as the prosodic an paralinguistic features– intonation ,stress ,rhythm ,loudness , facial expression , & gesture.

Eg that’s very clever means that’s not vey clever. we can also implies what is not said.

I don’t like coffee.

With rise fall of intonation we implies I like tea.She is very clever suggest that she rather ugly.Indicate that what we are saying is not really true.

We can by various devices including intonation indicate hat is important contrastive word or new.

I saw john this morning.

No information not concern with information but relation between the information and previous information.

Variety in ‘Speech act’ we warn , we threat or we promise.

There is bull in the field.

Meant as warning not only as an information.

Say one thing and mean another.e.g. He is a nice man (leader of a industry)

Mean to suggest that he is not really very good at his profession but his character is good.

There is problem in associated with sentences. e.g. Have you stop beating your wife?

Impossible to answer this type of question even in ‘NO’ or ‘YES’ without admit that you have beaten in past.

Language concern with the variety of social relation,Can be rude or polite

e.g. Shut up or

Would you please be silent?

Would you keep down your voice down a little please?

Small talk at parties --- not for information but as part of social activity.

Lyons (1977) suggest that we should draw a distinction between sentence meaning and utterance meaning, sentences meaning can be predicate through grammatical and lexical features, while utterance meaning include all that we have discuss before.

There are two reservation First, we cannot always clearly decide what is sentence meaning and what is utterance meaning.

It is argued that intonation of a sentence is a part of grammatical form.

Intonation signals

Sentence meaning utterance meaning

e.g. a sarcastic intonation have function as a negative.Prosodic & paralinguistic feature are so varied so advices

to not include them in grammatical analysis.

A prepositional meaning is in the both.

Lexical sentence Grammatical sentenceStop including in it meaning hat the activity was being

carried out previously.

Secondly ‘utterance is a little misleading’

Utterance usually taken to be unique speech event.

No Two utterance are same but LINNGUIST make generalization , mislead by HERACLITUS dictum (statement) ‘you can’t step into the same river twice.

e.g. it’s a fine day single utterance

It is a fine day

(utterance cannot be recognized )

LYONS mean by utterance meaning, part of sentence.

Not related with but associated with

Grammatical or lexical paralinguistic's Features features.

For some scholar it is not the sentence that is basic unit of semantics REASON semantics must be Truth-Conditional

and that proposition not the sentence always characterized As TRUE or FALSE.

One argument in the favor: I was there yesterday uttered a different time at

different place by different places. Such sentences cannot be regarded as true or false but different proposition are there.

Logic (truth conditional)

Grammatical form or proposition meaning lexical item.

S

Every boy loves some girl.

Every boy loves every boy loves a different girl. the same girl.

Difference between sentence and proposition can be direct or in indirect speech.

Grave difficulties restricting semantics to proposition.

Conclusion :All kind of utterance manning that w disused will

be outside of semantics, we shall be restricted to statements.

While question or command cannot be excluded because they are as important as statements, because language is not only to convey information.

some sentences convey meaning of probabilities, which take meaning from context can ever be stated in proposition terms. And if so semantics restricted to proposition is extraordinary limited.

Thank you!