Semantics in a Model of Grammar Meaning, Thought, and Reality

The semantic knowledge useful for choosing the items that express what they want to express and how to find the meaning's in what other people say. It demonstrates in the 10 semantic knowledge of speaker.

1.   Speakers know whether something is meaningful or not.
2.   Speakers know that two sentences have the same meaning essentially. E.g:
Rebecca got home before Robert.
Robert got home before Rebecca.
Robert arrived at home after Rebecca.
Rebecca got home later than Robert.
3.   Speakers agree when the two words have the same meaning in a given context.
Where did you purchase these tools?
Purchase=Buy
4.   Speakers recognise the contradictory sentence.
Edgar is married.
Edgar is fairly rich.
Edgar is no longer young.
Edgar is a bachelor.
5.   Speakers agree when the two words have the opposite meaning in
      a given context.
Betty cut a thick slice of cake.
Thick x Thin
6.   Synonyms and Antonyms are semantic features.
7.   Some sentences have double meaning (ambigous).
      E.g Marjorie doesn’t care for her parakeet. It means:
Doesn’t like it;
doesn’t take care of it
8.   Speakers know how the language is used when people interact.
      They constitute adjacency pair.
9.   Speakers are aware that two statements may be related in such a
      way that if one is true, the other must also be true (entailment).
10. Speakers know that the message conveyed in one sentence may
      presupose other pieces of knowledge.
      For example :
      Andy Murfee usually drives his Datsun to work.
      It presuposes:
      There is a person named Andy Murfee.
      Andy Murfee works.
      There is a Datsun that belongs to Andy Murfee.
      Andy Murfee knows how to drive an automobile.

Meaning

The triangle (Ogden&Richard)

The triangle (Ogden&Richard) represents of how we associated (mirroring) the signs by their noises and the objects reflected.

illustration

The 'illustration' above is -> symbolized -> Ices

Words stand in a relationship to the world, and make statement about them. The relationship by which language hooks onto the world is called 'reference' and the semantic links between elements within the vocabulary system are an aspect of their 'sense' or meaning.

Word and Sentence
The symbolization of the objects results words considered as lexicon or the mental store of these words. The words have their meaning and they are created by the speaker to be in a grammatical construction named sentence. The sentence is compositional because the meaning of the expression is determined by the meaning of the component parts and the way in which they are combined.

To connect the semantic information in the lexicon with the compositional meaning in of sentences, there is syntactic rules to operate indipendently of semantic rules in a level of logical form (proposition). A sentence is also as an abstract grammatical elements obtained from utterances. It is a construction of words in aparticular sequence which is meaningful. A sentence can be what is communicated by particular pieces of language.

Sentence and Utterance
Uttterances are as the phonetic information of the grammatical elements. An utterance is an act of speech or writing. The meaning of an utterance is the meaning of the sentence plus the meaning of the circumstances.

The utterance involves prosody (intonation and accent) or the meaningful elements of speech apart from the words that are uttered. It means that the voice or appearance may have an effect on the conversation and on the way our verbal message are interpreted. Therefore, a face to face communication events contains linguistic and non linguistic elements.

Linguistic element: -vocal and verbal (words put together to form utterances)/representing sentences, -vocal and non verbal (prosody which utterances are spoken). Non-linguistic: -vocal paralanguage as the tone of voice, -non vocal as distances maintained (appearance, gesture and silent).

The utterances have the particular meaning based on the speaker’s interpretation. The study of this case called ‘pragmatics which focuses on speaker meaning.

Meaning, Thought and Reality
Reference is the way speakers and heares use an expression successfully; denotation is the knowledge they have that makes their use successful. When refering something, it is for denoting something. The nominals that are denoted having names. Furthermore, language furnishes the meanings for expressing a wide range of attitudes called connotation.

The other aspect is sense relations as the meaning of any expression varies with context, what other expressions it occurs with and what expressions it contrasts with. A denotation identifies the central aspect of word meaning which everybody generally agrees about. Connotation refers to the personal aspect of meaning, the emotional associations that the word arouses.

Mental Representation
Mental representation is the image as concept of meaning that needs a sufficient conditions. The concept of a word is composed of a set of necesary and sufficient conditions, named definition. The model of the concept is prototype which views as the typical members of category or a sets of characteristic features. E.g., Bird : has wings, can fly, has feathers.

Words, concepts, and thinking
Sapir (1949b) said that Language is a guide to ‘social reality’.