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Semantic Vii

The document discusses key concepts in linguistics including universe of discourse, referring expressions, opaque and equative contexts, predicates, predicators, and the roles of predicator and argument in sentences. The universe of discourse refers to the real or imaginary situation or world that participants in a communication assume they are discussing. Referring expressions are used to refer to something or someone in an utterance. Predicates are words that can function as the predicator, or main verb, in a sentence. The predicator and referring expressions play the roles of predicator and argument in sentences.

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خزين الاحسان
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95 views

Semantic Vii

The document discusses key concepts in linguistics including universe of discourse, referring expressions, opaque and equative contexts, predicates, predicators, and the roles of predicator and argument in sentences. The universe of discourse refers to the real or imaginary situation or world that participants in a communication assume they are discussing. Referring expressions are used to refer to something or someone in an utterance. Predicates are words that can function as the predicator, or main verb, in a sentence. The predicator and referring expressions play the roles of predicator and argument in sentences.

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خزين الاحسان
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PPT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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UNIVERSE OF DISCOURSE

The universe of discourse for any utterance is the particular situation or world, real
or imaginary that the participant of the discourse assumes he/she is talking about at
the time.
Ex: - Indonesia is suffering from various kinds of crisis > real
- Gatotkaca was flying in the sky > unreal
No universe of discourse is a totally fictitious world. It can be totally real, or it is a
world which is a combination between real and unreal worlds.
Ex: - Our country (real) & various kinds of crisis (real)
- Hanoman (unreal) & mountains (real)
Two people might be working within partially or completely different universes of
discourse. But having the same universe of discourse is essential to achieve a
successful communication.
Referring Expression is any expression used in an utterance to refer to something or
someone. In `Herman phoned me` the name Herman is referring expression in this
utterance. But in “There's no one called Herman in our class” Herman is not referring
expression.
 The same expression can be a referring expression or not depending on the
context. Whether an expression is a referring expression is heavily dependent on
linguistic contexts and on the circumstances of utterance.
Normally, different expressions referring to the same thing/person have the same
meaning, but it is not always the case.
Ex: The morning star and the evening star refer to the same planet, Venus.
1. Opaque context is a part of a sentence which could be made into a complete
sentence by the addition of a referring expression, but will yield sentences with
different meanings when uttered in a given situation.
Ex: George believes that. (He……) Is a genius.
 Typically opaque contexts involve a certain kind of verbs like want, believe, think, and
wonder about.
2. Equative Sentence is one which is used to declare that two referring expressions
found in the sentence have the same referent.
Ex: Bill Clinton is the president off the U.S.A.
3. equative sentences is that the order of the two referring expressions can be reversed
without loss of acceptability.
Ex: The president of the U.S.A is Bill Clinton.
4. Reversal test is not a perfect diagnostic test for determining equative
sentences. In a certain case it does not work.
Ex: What we need is a democratic government > a democratic
government is not a referring expression, because a user of this
sentence would not have any particular democratic
government in mind, but the sentence is reversible. While the
sentence That is the man who kidnapped the activist is equative, but
it is not reversible.
Predicate is any word (sequence of words) which can function as the predicator of
a sentence.
Ex: - Predicate : hungry, in, crook, asleep, hit, show.
- Non Predicate and, or, but, not.
Certain words can be ambigous, they can have more than one sense.
Ex: The word man has three senses: (a) human being, (b) male adult human
being, (c) transitive verb.
 A simple sentence only has one predicator, although it may contain more than
one instance of a predicate.
Ex: His new company has many young bright potential employees
Predicator > has
predicates > new, company, many, young, bright, potential,
employee.
 We can also talk of predicate, in the case of preposition, nouns, and
adjectives.
Ex: - The lamp is over the table (over is a two-place predicate).
- she is intelligent (intelligent is a one-place predicate).
- john is a corporal (corporal is a one-place predicate).
Predicator: sentences contain one or more referring expressions and some
other words that do not from any part of referring expressions.
Ex: Marcus Brutus killed Julius Caesar.
 The predicators in sentences can be of various parts of speech (adjectives,
verbs, prepositions, and noun). Words of other parts of speech
(conjunctions, articles, qualifiers) cannot serve as predicators in sentences.
Ex: Achmad is Malaysian Achmad > argument
Malaysian > Predicator
The role of predicator (played by predicate) and the role of argument (Played
by the referring expressions).

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