Unit 1 Basic ideas in Semantics
Semantics is the study of meaning in language.
Speaker meaning is what a speaker means (intends to convey) when he uses a piece of language.
Sentence meaning (or word meaning) is what a sentence (or word) means, i.e. what is counts as the equivalent of in the language concerned.
A theory is a precisely specified, coherent, and economical frame-work of interdependent statements and definitions, constructed so that as large a number as possible of particular basic facts can either be seen to follow from it or be describable in terms of it.
Unit 2 Sentence, Utterance and Proposition
An utterance is any stretch of talks, 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.
Utterances are physical events. Events are ephemeral. Utterances die on the wind.
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.
In semantics we need to make a careful distinction between utterances and sentences. In particular we need some way of making it clear when we are discussing sentences and when utterances. We adopt the convention that anything written between single quotation marks represents an utterance, and anything italicized represents a sentence or (similarly abstract) part of a sentence, such as a phrase or a word.
We have defined a sentence as a string of words. A given sentence always consists of the same words, and in the same order. Any change in the words, or in their order, makes a different sentence, for our purposes.
It would make sense to say that an utterance was in a particular accent. However, it would not make strict sense to say that a sentence was in a particular accent. Accent and voice quality belong strictly to the utterance, not to the sentence uttered.
Not all utterances are actually tokens of sentences, but sometimes only of parts of sentences, e.g. phrases or single words.
Utterance of non-sentences, e.g. short phrases, or single words, are used by people in communication all the time. Semantics is concerned with the meanings of non-sentences, such as phrases and incomplete sentences, just as much as with whole sentences. But it is more convenient to begin our analysis with the case of the whole sentences. The meaning of whole sentences involve propositions; the notion of a proposition is central to semantics.
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.
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.
True propositions correspond to facts, in the ordinary sense of the word fact. False propositions do not correspond to facts.
Proposition, 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.
A single proposition could be expressed by using several different sentences and each of these sentences could be uttered an infinite number of times.
Unit 3 Reference and sense
In talking of sense, we deal with relationship inside the language; in talking of reference we deal with the relationships between language and the world.
By means of reference, a speaker indicates which things in the world(including persons) are being talked about. Reference is a relationship between parts of a language and things outside the language(in the word). Some expressions in a language can have variable reference. The reference of an expression vary according to the circumstances(time, place, etc.) in which the expression is used, or the topic of the conversation in which the expression is used.
On 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 is not a thing at all. In fact, it is difficult to say what sort of entity the sense of an expression is. It is sometimes useful to think of sense as that part of the meaning of an expression that is left over when reference is factored out. The sense of an expression is an abstraction, but it is helpful to note that it is an abstraction that can be entertained in the mind of a language user. When a person understands fully what is said to him, it is reasonable to say that he grasps the sense of the expressions he hears.
Every expression that has meaning has sense, but not every expression has reference.
The relationship between reference and utterance is not so direct as that between sense and proposition, but there is a similarity --- both referring and uttering are acts performed by particular speakers on particular occasions.
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