education

1. “Stylistics”
ENG-477
By: Mubashir Husain
Lecturer. Department of ENGLISH
KUST
Lecture 14
Semantics of Sentences

2. Discussion agenda
• Objectives of class
• Problem with word meaning
• Sentence semantics
• proposition
• Entailment
• Predicate Logic

3. Class objectives
• To be able to define and understand the concept of proposition,
entailment and predicate logic
• To be able to do analysis of different dimensions of sentence semantic
• To identify and analyze proposition, entailment and predicate logic
within given text.

4. Problem with word meaning
• the definition of meaning on the basis of words alone is problematic
• whether the basic unit of meaning is not just the word as the
sentence

5. Main Approaches Toward Sentence Meaning
• How the meaning of a sentence can be defined in terms of simple or complex
propositions and
• How propositions can be related by means of so-called Entailment relationships
• How the machinery of predicate logic can be used to describe the internal
structure of propositions

6. • first of all however let's define the central problems that arise with word
meaning over and above the non semantic problems of word definition
• there are many difficulties in defining word meaning for example the problem
of handling function words how can we specify the meaning of items such as
and or
• however or we face cross linguistic problems where across languages the same
concept may involve different degrees of transparency such as thimble in
English and finger hood literally meaning finger hat in German furthermore
there are numerous sentences whose meaning cannot be defined on the basis
of the meaning of their words
•

7. • in metaphors such as time is money for example the words involved
do not reflect the overall meaning the same applies to idiomatic
expressions such as
• it is raining cats and dogs
• and often paralinguistic features such as gestures facial expressions
etc accompany the uttering of linguistic constructions and influence
their meaning for this reason semantics is not confined to word
meaning but should incorporate the meaning of sentences as well

8. • a central approach to what sentence meaning assigns truth values to
sentences
• this approach is referred to as propositional logic and it treats
sentences as propositions
• in logic the meaning of sentences is defined in terms of statements or
propositions and not just in terms of the sentence itself
• One argument in favor of this treatment is that different sentences
may be converted into identical propositions

9. • let's illustrate that here are John and Mary obviously John is pointing
a gun at Mary so one sentence that could be derived from this
situation is that John is killing Mary another one could be that Mary is
being killed by John a further sentence could be John is doing
something to Mary and so on and so forth

10. • however in looking at these sentences in terms of their meaning they
essentially mean the same thing and
• this meaning is defined in terms of so-called propositions
• let us see how we can formalize sentence meaning in terms of
propositions and how the machinery of propositional logic works a
proposition can be defined as the basic semantic content of a
sentence
• or in more philosophical terms what a sentence says about the world
propositions are labeled with small letters from P which stands for
the initial letter of proposition upwards

11. REFERENCES
• (Edward Finegan, Language: Its Structure and Use, 6th ed. Wadsworth, 2012
• (Hans Henrich Hock and Brian D. Joseph, Language History, Language Change, and Language Relationship. Walter
de Gruyter, 1996)
• (Andy Kirkpatrick, World English. Cambridge University Press, 2007)
• (Lyle Campbell, Historical Linguistics: An Introduction. MIT Press, 2004)
• (Bas Aarts, Oxford Modern English Grammar. Oxford University Press, 2011)
• Prof jurgen Handke 2013 sentences of semantics