Nama : Iva mulyani A.

NIM : 40300117125

AG 6

SUMMARY

CHAPTER IV

THE SCOPE OF MEANING II: INTERPERSONAL CONTEXT

A. Interpersonal context: illocutionary force and speech acts

The relations between language and context are not limited to those in which a
linguistic expression simply names or describes an already existing referent or state of
affairs. The assertion of facts about the world is just one of the acts which we can use
language to perform. Language was seen essentially as a means of describing (asserting
facts about) reality, and its importance as an instrument which could perform a whole
variety of different functions was not fully appreciated.

the fundamental role of assertion in language can be seen as a consequence of

four large-scale features of human social organization and the types of talk-exchange it
engenders:

 communicative topics are often outside the immediate, perceptually available

range;
 much pertinent information is not held in common by the participants in the
communicative exchange;
 the rapidity of change in the human environment necessitates periodic updating
of the body of shared background knowledge; • the participants are often
strangers.

B. Locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts

Austin distinguished between three types of act present in every utterance, the
locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts. He defi ned them as follows:

 locutionary act: the act of saying something;

 illocutionary act: the act performed in saying something; and
 perlocutionary act: the act performed by saying something.

The locutionary act – the act of saying something – is the act of expressing the
basic, literal meanings of the words chosen. in uttering the words You will get your hands
blown off, a speaker performs the locutionary act of stating that the hearer will get their
hands blown off. The illocutionary act is the act that the speaker performs in saying
something. In many contexts, utterance of the statement You will get your hands blown
off is intended, and understood, as an act of warning: the utterance thus has the
illocutionary force of a warning. Thanking, congratulating, and advising are all acts
which differ in their illocutionary force; in all of them, the speaker does more than
describe or assert facts about some situation. The perlocutionary act is the act of
producing an effect in the hearer by means of the utterance. Depending on the
circumstances. Depending on the circumstances, the perlocutionary act involved in saying
You will get your hands blown off might be to dissuade the hearer from playing with a
lighter and a stick of dynamite, to frighten the hearer, to encourage them to go on
provocatively waving a naked fl ame in front of a bag of fi reworks, etc.

C. Consequences of the illocutionary perspective

Focusing on the illocutionary aspects of utterances has two important

consequences for linguistic theory. The fi rst concerns the centrality of truth and falsity to
meaning. The second break with traditional theories of language brought about by a focus
on speech acts concerns the question of the basic object of semantic analysis.Because of
the frequency of indirect speech acts, any proposed convention linking a given
communicative purpose with a given illocutionary form will thus have to reckon with the
fact that the same form may also be used to achieve quite different purposes.

The utterance of a statement, just like the performance of an illocutionary act like
promising, thus involves both speaker and hearer in a network of commitments and
consequences which imply certain things about their current states and beliefs, and
commit them to certain future actions. The use of language is thus not the disembodied
exercise of human reason asserting neutral facts about the world. It is a situated,
contextual act in a network of social roles and responsibilities.

INTERPERSONAL CONTEXT: SPEAKER’S INTENTION AND HEARER’S

INFERENCE

The idea that conventions underlie the illocutionary force of utterances has been
much criticized. The central problem with such a theory is that it proves to be
exceedingly difficult to state what the convention behind any given speech act might be.
The general problem with convention-based approaches to illocutionary force is that they
ignore the role of the appreciation of speakers’ intentions in our understanding of
meaning. The importance of intention in meaning is ‘the meaning (in general) of a sign
needs to be explained in terms of what the users of the sign do (or should) mean by it on
particular occasions.

The importance of speaker’s intention applies to both the illocutionary and the
locutionary aspects of utterances. On the locutionary side, it is by making inferences
about the speaker’s intentions that the hearer selects the relevant aspects of the
encyclopaedic knowledge called up by a linguistic expression: the encyclopaedic
information relevant to the interpretation of an utterance is the information which the
speaker intended to convey, and the hearer must decide which of the potentially infi nite
elements of encyclopaedic knowledge the speaker had in mind.

the speaker’s intention is, on this view, a fundamental aspect of the process of
meaning-creation and understanding in language. Linguistic communication is an
intentional-inferential process, in which hearers try to infer speakers’ intentions on the
basis of the ‘clues’ provided by language.

INTERPERSONAL CONTEXT: IMPLICATURE

A. Discrepancies Between Truth-Functional Meaning And Utterance Meaning

committed to a truth-conditional or truth-functional view of meaning, which can

be described as the view that knowing the meaning of an expression consists in knowing
the conditions under which it is true. It was from this point of view that he was struck by
a disparity between the (truth-conditionally conceived) sentence meaning of certain
fundamental linguistic expressions and the utterance meanings they seem to have in
actual language use.

B. Conventional And Conversational Implicature

The introduction of this term is a way of generalizing over the different types of
communicative intention which hearers attribute to speakers: the implicatures of an
utterance are what it is necessary to believe the speaker is thinking, and intending the
hearer to think, in order to account for what they are saying. Some of these implicatures,
like the implicature of contrast carried by but, are conventional implicatures: they are part
of the typical force of the word, whether or not they conform to its strict, truth-conditional
(logically defi ned) meaning.

C. Gricean maxims and the Cooperative Principle

The Cooperative Principle is essentially the principle that the participants in a

conversation work together in order to ‘manage’ their speech exchange in the most effi
cient way possible: Our talk exchanges do not normally consist of a succession of
disconnected remarks, and would not be rational if they did. They are characteristically,
to some degree at least, cooperative efforts; and each participant recognizes in them, to
some extent, a common purpose or set of purposes, or at least a mutually accepted
direction. But at each stage, some possible conversational moves would be excluded as
conversationally unsuitable. We might then formulate a rough general principle which
participants will be expected (ceteris paribus) to observe, namely: Make your
conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the
accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. One might
label this the Cooperative Principle. Not all the maxims have equal importance. The
brevity clause of the Manner maxim, for example, is frequently disobeyed.

D. Infringing The Maxims

Obviously, these maxims are frequently not observed. Grice considers four ways
in which a speaker may fail to observe a maxim. First, a maxim may be violated, as for
example when one deliberately sets out to mislead (in violation of the fi rst maxim of
Quality), to confuse or to bore (violation of various Manner maxims). Second, one may
simply opt out of the Cooperative Principle, for example by saying ‘I can’t say more, my
lips are sealed’, in order to avoid divulging a secret. Thirdly, one may be faced by a clash,
for example if it was impossible to fulfi l the informativity maxim without infringing the
evidentiary one (see (11) below). The last, and most important category of non-
observance of the maxims is maxim-fl outing.

E. Are The Maxims Universal?

The universality of the Gricean maxims has been strongly questioned by Keenan
(1976). Keenan says that we can readily imagine situations even in our own society which
do not observe the fi rst maxim of Quantity, which stipulates that hearers are to make
their contributions ‘as informative as is required for the current purposes of the
exchange’.

F. Relevance Theory

Relevance Theory, finally, represents a third tradition which challenges some of

the central presuppositions of the study of meaning. According to Relevance Theorists,
the production and understanding of utterances is explained as the result of a universal
comprehension procedure which consists in selecting the most relevant aspects of a
word’s meaning in a given situation. There is no distinction between literal and non-
literal meaning, and what meanings are activated by a word is highly dependent on the
particular context in which it is uttered.

G. Semantics And Pragmatics

The focus in pragmatics on language as it is actually used in context poses a

signifi cant challenge to linguistic semantics. If, as an empirical discipline with ‘scientifi
c’ aspirations, linguistics doesn’t set out to study language as it is actually used.
pragmatic considerations like Reference assignment, scope interpretation and
implicatures like the temporal subsequency reading of and may enter into the truth-
conditions of an utterance. On the traditional view, language consists in the
communication of a defi nite content: a certain proposition either is or is not
communicated by a given utterance; other propositions, in turn, may or may not be
implied by it, but, if they are implied by it, this means that they are not specifi cally
communicated.

SUMMARY

CHAPTER V

1. LEXICAL RELATIONS

A competent speaker knows how it relates to other words of the language: which
words are synonyms? Which are antonyms? Which are meronyms, linked by the relation
of a part to a whole? And which are hyponyms, linked by the relation kind of ?
Describing and accounting for these relationships has often been taken as one of the
principal tasks of lexical semantics. Relationships like synonymy, antonymy, meronymy
and so on all concern the paradigmatic relations of an expression: the relations which
determine the choice of one lexical item over another. In the construction of any
utterance, the speaker is typically confronted with a choice between various lexical items.
The choices between different antonyms, meronyms and hyponyms will be made on the
basis of the different meanings which they convey. Antonyms, meronyms, hyponyms and
synonyms are only the most important of the lexical relations it is possible to identify
within the vocabulary of a language.

a. ANTONYMY

Speakers of English can readily agree that words like good-bad, love-hate and in-
out are opposites or antonyms. The notion of oppositeness involved here seems to cover
several different types of relation; in general, however, antonymy may be characterized as
a relationship of incompatibility between two terms with respect to some given dimension
of contrast. Some words seem to have more than one antonym, depending on the
dimension of contrast involved (girl has both boy and woman, depending on whether the
dimension of contrast is sex or age; sweet has both bitter and sour. Not every word has an
obvious antonym: library, of, and corresponding are three cases for which there is no
obvious relevant dimension of contrast and for which antonyms are consequently hard to
identify. And even where an obvious dimension of contrast does exist, antonyms are not
always available: angry, for instance, does not have any obvious antonym in English even
though we can easily conceive of the scale of arousal and calmness to which it belongs.

b. MERONYMY

Meronymy (Greek meros: ‘part’) is the relation of part to whole: hand is a meronym of
arm, seed is a meronym of fruit, blade is a meronym of knife (conversely, arm is the
holonym of hand, fruit is the holonym of seed, etc.). Surprisingly, not all languages seem
to have an unambiguous means of translating the phrase ‘part of’, but meronymy is
nevertheless often at the origin of various polysemy patterns (where a single word has
more than one meaning and an important lexical relation for that reason.

c. HYPONYMY

Hyponymy (Greek hypo- ‘under’) is the lexical relation described in English by

the phrase kind/type/sort of. A chain of hyponyms defines a hierarchy of elements: sports
car is a hyponym of car since a sports car is a kind of car, and car, in turn, is a hyponym
of vehicle since a car is a kind of vehicle. Other examples of hyponym hierarchies include

1) blues – jazz – music

2) ski-parka – parka – jacket
3) commando – soldier – member of armed forces
4) martini – cocktail – drink and
5) paperback – book.
6)

A standard identification procedure for hyponymy is based on the notion of class-

inclusion: A is a hyponym of B if every A is necessarily a B, but not every B is
necessarily an A. For example, every car is a vehicle, but not every vehicle is a car, since
there are also buses, motorbikes and trucks. Hence, car is a hyponym of vehicle.
Furthermore, hyponymy is usually taken to be transitive: if A is a hyponym of B, and B
of C, then A is a (more remote) hyponym of C.As we will see, hyponymy is a major
semantic relation in the grammar of many languages. Furthermore, a particular type of
hyponymy, taxonomy, discussed in the next section, is an important aspect of the way we
talk about the natural world.

Hyponymy also has a crucial communicative function. It often happens that we

are unable to retrieve the most accurate, precise term for the referent we have in mind. At
other times, mention of the most precise term would be needlessly informative and thus
violate one of the pragmatic constraints which often seem to be operative in
communication.

d. TAXONOMY

Taxonomy, in a broad sense the science of classification, but more strictly the
classification of living and extinct organisms—i.e., biological classification. The term is
derived from the Greek taxis (“arrangement”) and nomos (“law”). Taxonomy is,
therefore, the methodology and principles of systematic botany and zoology and sets up
arrangements of the kinds of plants and animals in hierarchies of superior and subordinate
groups.

e. SYNONYMY
 In discussing synonymy, the relation of meaning identity, an initial distinction
needs to be drawn between lexical synonymy (synonymy between individual lexemes)
and phrasal synonymy (synonymy between expressions consisting of more than one
lexeme). We will only be concerned here with lexical synonymy, assuming that phrasal
synonymy can mostly be derived from the synonymy of the phrases’ component lexemes
(considered in their associated grammatical structures).Meaning identity (synonymy) is a
part of the metalinguistic stock-in-trade of ordinary speakers of English: we often refer to
words as ‘having the same meaning’. However, we usually restrict our statement of the
synonymy of two words (or phrases) to the utterance level

Lexical synonymy has been variously defi ned in the semantics literature. The
general defi nition of ‘identity of meaning’ is mostly accepted. however defines it as
‘identity/similarity’ of meaning), and it is the one we adopt here. Within this defi nition,
however, there are a number of different terminological conventions. Of course, what is
important in such cases is not to decide which of the different possible uses of a technical
term like ‘synonym’ is better (or, even less, correct), but simply to define what is meant
by the label in question and to use it consistently and without ambiguity.

For some authors synonymy is a context-bound phenomenon, two words being

synonyms in a certain given context, whereas for others it is context-free: if two words
are synonymous they are identical in meaning in all contexts.

2. COMPONENTIAL ANALYSIS

The importance of appreciating a lexeme’s semantic relations in order to understand its

meaning is one of the motivations for a componential approach to semantic analysis.
Componential analysis analyses meaning in terms of binary features (i.e. features with
only two possible values, + or –), and represents a translation into semantics of the
principles of structuralist phonological analysis. As a type of definitional analysis,
componential analysis inherits the failings of traditional definitions, and words for which
it proves hard to couch definitions are also hard to analyse componentially.

3. POLYSEMY AND MONOSEMY

Theoretical and ordinary description of meaning would both be impossible

without the recognition of separate senses within the same word. Words with several
related senses are described as polysemous. Polysemy contrasts simultaneously with
monosemy, the case where a word has a single meaning, and homonymy, the case where
two unrelated words happen to share the same phonological form. In spite of the intuitive
obviousness of these distinctions, there are many instances where it is not clear whether a
word should be analysed as polysemous or monosemous, and no absolute criteria have
ever been proposed which will successfully discriminate them.
 SUMMARY
CHAPTER 6

Logic as a representation of meaning

 The nature and importance of logic

Logic investigates the properties of valid arguments and chains of reasoning, and
specifies the conditions which arguments must meet in order to be valid. It is important to
linguists for three principal reasons:

 it constitutes one of the oldest and most developed traditions of the study of
meaning
 it is at the heart of formal and computational theories of semantics
 certain logical concepts, like ¬ or ), provide an interesting point of contrast with
their natural language equivalents.

 Logical form, validity and soundness

Logic analyses the underlying logical structure of arguments, known as their logical
form. This is independent of the way in which the argument happens to be phrased in any
given language.
We distinguished between valid and sound arguments:

 Valid arguments are ones in which, if the premises are true, the conclusion must
also be true.
 Sound arguments are valid arguments which have true premises.

 Propositional logic

Propositional logic is the branch of logic that studies relations between propositions. A
proposition is something which serves as the premise or conclusion of an argument. In
propositional logic, special importance is given to the four propositional connectives or
operators not, and, or and if . . . then. These connectives are truth-functional. This
means that whether the propositions to which they are added are true or not depends
solely on the truth of the original propositions. The values or meanings of the operators
can be specified in the form of truth tables, which display the way in which logical
connectives affect the truth of the propositions in which they appear.
  Logic as representation and as perfection of meaning

The truth-functional definitions of the propositional connectives are quite often counter-
intuitive and unnatural. None of the operators corresponds perfectly with any English
equivalent. The clash between the meanings of the logical connectives and their ordinary
language equivalents reveals a contrast between two different interpretations of the nature
of logic: logic as a representation and as a perfection of
meaning.

 Predicate logic

‘Some’ and ‘all’ are the basic notions of predicate logic. Predicate logic studies the
logical form of propositions involving three kinds of expression:

 singular terms or individual constants, which refer to individuals (whether

things or people). Singular terms are symbolized by lower case letters.
 predicates, which represent properties or relations, such as ‘primate’, ‘hairy’ or
‘adore’. Predicates are symbolized by upper case letters.
quantifiers, like ‘some’ (_) and ‘all’ (_). Predicates have a certain number of arguments.
An argument is the individual or individuals to which the property or relation expressed
by the predicate is attributed. _ is called the existential quantifier. (_x) is read as ‘there
is.
 Summary Chapter 7
Meaning and Cognition I
Categorization and Cognitive Semantics

 The semantics of categorization

Categorization is an important topic in semantics because language can be seen
as means of categorizing experience. A word like flower, for example,
categorizes an indefinitely large number of different entities in the world as all
examples of a single kind of thing, the category FLOWER. The actual types of
flower vary widely – think of the difference between a tulip, a carnation and a
sunflower – but these differences in no way affect the categorization of all types
as flowers.

 Classical categorization
Standard logical approaches to language, like the ones discussed in Chapter
6, are two-valued approaches. This means that they only recognize two truth
values, true and false. On this approach, any proposition must either be true
or false. There is no room for the proposition to be partly true and partly
false, or true in some respects but false in others. The two-valued approach
goes hand in hand with the classical view of definition.

 Problems with classical categories

The classical view of categorization is open to a number of criticisms. First,
there are remarkably few examples of adequate definitions in the classical
mould.

The classical view of categorization is rejected by many

semanticists since it seems unable to account for basic semantic
phenomena, such as the following:

• There are categories in which some members are better

exemplars of the category than others.
• There are categories in which the boundaries of membership are
not clear-cut: it is not always possible to say whether or not
something is a member of the category.

 Prototype categorization
 The idea that category membership is graded is at the heart of the
prototype theory of categorization, most strongly associated with the
psychologist Eleanor Rosch and her colleagues (Rosch 1975, 1978; Rosch
and Mervis 1975). Prototype theory was originally developed as a theory of
how concrete, visual objects, like furniture, colour or fish, are categorized.
But several studies have revealed prototype effects in domains involving
activities.

 Problems with prototype categories

 Problems identifying the attributes

The first type of problem concerns the nature of the semantic
attributes on which judgements of prototypicality are based. In our
discussion of categories we have simply isolated the attributes in an
intuitive fashion, an apparently unproblematic procedure. Attribute
identification depends on category identification In the ‘has a
seat’ case, for example, the identification of this attribute seems to
paradoxically depend on a prior identification of the CHAIR
category itself.

 Accounting for category boundaries

A second type of problem with the prototype theory of
categorization is that it fails to account for category boundaries.
The very insight behind prototype theory is that category
boundaries are ‘fuzzy’.

 Scope of prototype categorization

A third type of question concerns the scope and applicability of
prototype theory as a general explanation of natural language
semantics. Most of the original work on prototypes concerned
visible categories like BIRD or FURNITURE. In spite of prototype
theory accounts of categories like LIE, mentioned above, several
scholars have questioned whether the theory is equally justified
when applied to abstract, non-visual categories.

 Prototypes and formulating definitions

Another objection concerns the effect of prototype theory in
semantics. Wierzbicka (1990), for example, complains that the idea
that categories have fuzzy boundaries has served as an excuse to
avoid the painstaking work of accurate definition.

 Prototype experiments and metalinguistic belief

A final objection concerns the contrast between the evidence for a
prototype model of semantics versus more traditional ones. At least
 some of the experimental evidence that motivates the postulation of
prototypes can be criticized on the grounds that it is not evidence
about how speakers actually use words, but evidence about how
they think words are used or should be used.

 Language and conceptualization: cognitive approaches to semantics

 Commitments of cognitive semantics

The label cognitive semantics covers a variety of quite different
approaches. In general, however, these approaches are characterized by a
holistic vision of the place of language within cognition.

 Idealized cognitive models

The conclusions of prototype research inspired much cognitivist reflection on
meaning. Inspired by the work of Fillmore (1982), Lakoff (1987) proposed
that prototype effects are by-products of the fact that our knowledge is
organized into structures stored in long-term memory that he calls idealized
cognitive models (ICMs). The notion of ICM is meant to capture the
contribution of encyclopaedic knowledge to our understanding of concepts.

 Embodiment and image schemas

Many cognitive semanticists stress the embodied nature of the
conceptualizations underlying language. To say that a conceptualization is
embodied is to draw attention to its origin in basic physical experience.

 Radial categories in word meaning

Recall that cognitive semantics identifies meaning with conceptual structure,
the network of stored representations in our memory involved in thought and
language. A word can be seen as an entry point to a certain ‘region’ of our
conceptual structure. Using the ideas discussed in the preceding sections, we
can now sketch the way in which cognitive semantics models the conceptual
knowledge structures underlying meaning. We will do this with the English
noun head.

 Problems with cognitive semantics

Cognitivist analyses of meaning focus on metaphor and metonymy,
encyclopaedic meaning description and semantic extension, and enable a
much more detailed representation of semantic content than is possible in
more formal or componential approaches.