GCWU,SIALKOT.

Sentence,Utterance,
Proposition andSemantic
Roles
SEMANTICS
Syeda Zainab Kubra
This paper aims to analyse the notion of sentence,utterance and proposition in semantic study.This
will also throw light on the semantic roles in details.

 Contents

 Introduction of Semantics

 Utterance
 Definition+Rule+explanantion
 Process of intepreting Utterance meaning

 Sentence
 Definition+Rule+explanantion

 New semantic triangle

 Five types of meaning of a sentence

 Proposition meaning
 Connotative meaning
 Cultural meaning
 Structural meaning (including grammatical meaning and collocative
meaning)
 Pragmatic meaning.

 Difference between sentence and Utterance

 Proposition
 Definition+Rule+explanantion
 Detailed analysis of proposition
 Comparative study of sentence,utterance and propositions.
 Semantic Roles

 Conclusion

 References
Assignment

Submitted to:Ma’m Madiha

Submitted by:Syeda Zainab Kubra

Roll no:11021502-012

Course Title:Semantics

Course Code:

Semester:6th

GCW University,Sialkot.
 Introduction
Semantic is a scientific study of language.Informally, it is easy to agree that meaning is the heart
of language. Meaning, we might say, is what language is for: to have a language without
meaning would be like having lungs without air. Only when sequences of sounds or letters have
a meaning do they qualify as language: infants’ babbling and bird song, for example, use the
same medium as human language – sound – but since they do not, and cannot, express meaning
we do not consider them as examples of language in the full sense of the word. Meaning is also
central to the experience of using language, as anyone knows who has ever listened to people
talking in an unknown language. Not only does such a language fail to express any meaning; it is
also often hard to catch hold of individual words: without knowing the meaning of an utterance,
it is hard to identify the separate words which constitute it. Without a capacity to express
meaning, then, language loses one of its essential aspects. We practically always speak or write
in order to express a meaning of one kind or another. This is most obviously true for pieces of
language which convey information: if someone suddenly says:

Engels was two and a half years younger than Marx.

then a meaning has been conveyed, and you are in possession of some information– whether true
or false – which you may not have previously known that Engels was two and a half years
younger than Marx.But not only sentences have meanings. Even the shortest, most
everydaywords, which we would not normally consider as containing information,like the, not,
of, or even ouch!, contribute something specific to the meanings of utterances in which they
occur and can thus be legitimately considered as having meanings in their own right.

From the above introductory paragraph,we get three notions which help meaning to express itself
in language.Information(Proposition)the basic idea/thought of the sentence; A proposition is a
sentence expressing something true or false.Secondly,Sentence,a unit of language,a string of
words put together by the grammatical rules of a language to mean something.Finally,Utterance,
An utterance is the use of any piece of language by a particular speaker on a particular situation. It can be
in the form of a sequence of sentences, a single clause, a single phrase, or just a single word.

These three terms fall into the category of basics of semantic study.In the following section we’ll
take a deep look in these in order to understand them.
  Utterance
Definition:An utterance is any stretch of talk, by one person, before and after which there is
silence on the part of that person.

Rule: 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.

Example:‘Hello’, ‘Not much’ are utterances.Where as,‘Pxgotmgt’ and

‘Schplotzenpflaaaaaaargh!’ are not utterances because these strings of sounds is not from any
language.

‘Utterances may consist of a single word, a single phrase or a single sentence. They may also
consist of a sequence of sentences. It is not unusual to find utterances that consist of one or more
grammatically incomplete sentence-fragments. In short, there is no simple relation of
correspondence between utterances and sentences’

Utterances are physical events. Events are ephemeral,located in space and time (as events like to
be).They involve two “participants” – an agent who produces a linguistic object and that
linguistic object itself. Utterances die on the wind.

a.“Not so loud.” (Something that was said to a student who was speaking rather
loudly.

b.“In H101.” (a student said this)

c.“People who buy these tickets often don’t have loads of money.”

(According to a BBC website report

Utterances are the raw data of linguistics. Each utterance is unique, having been produced by a
particular sender in a specific situation. Because they are tied to a sender and a time, utterances
can never be repeated. When early in the morning it is said, in our apartment, “Not so loud”,
because it was worried that the noise of TV might bother the neighbours, that was a different
utterance from(a). Even when someone is held to have said (or written) “the same thing twice”,
as in the case of people who “repeat themselves” (or someone who repeats what someone else
has uttered), there is going to be more than one utterance constituting the repetition – differing in
time, or having been made by a different speaker. No-one keeps a record of every utterance, but
in principle they are all distinguishable.

The abstract linguistic object on which an utterance is based is a sentence. It must be noticed that
the utterance “In H101” mentioned in (b) was based on the sentence The class will be in Room
H101, because it was said in response from asking “Where’s the class going to be?” We talk of
repetition when two or more utterances are based on the same sentence.

Uttererances are interpreted in context. The context of (c) indicated clearly that often was to be
understood as modifying what followed it, to mean ‘… are often not rich’, rather being a
modifier of what came before: ‘People who buy these tickets often …’. it is likely that the
speaker’s delivery would have signalled which of the two meanings was intended. For the
‘frequent purchaser’ meaning, there would probably have been an intonational break straight
after often, one that the report writer could have marked with a comma. Without such a break,
either interpretation would be possible, but the absence of a break could be taken as a pointer
towards the ‘often not well off ’ interpretation. Nonetheless, intonation does not obviate the need
to consider context: we tend to use context to check that we have heard the intonation correctly,
and to treat intonation as a clue regarding which contextual information to use.

The essential difference between sentences and utterances is that sentences are abstract, not tied
to contexts, whereas utterances are identified by their contexts. This is also the main way of
distinguishing between semantics and pragmatics. If you are dealing with meaning and there is
no context to consider, then you are doing semantics, but if there is a context to be brought into
consideration, then you are engaged in pragmatics. Pragmatics is the study of utterance
meaning. Semantics is the study of sentence meaning and word meaning.

Meaning of an utterance can be interpreted in three ways:

a. Literal meaning(that deals more with semnatics)

b. Explicature
c. Implicature (These two deal with pragmatics)
Let’s take a sentence and analysis these three stages on it.

A. That was the last bus.

Literal Meaning: The literal meaning of a sentence is based on just the semantic information
that you have from your knowledge of English. Among the things that people who know English
should be able to explain about the meaning of (A)are the following: something salient (That) is
equated, at an earlier time (was is a past tense form), to either the final (last) or the most recent
(last) bus. That meaning is available without wondering who might say or write the words, when
or where. No consideration of context is involved.

Explicature is a basic interpretation of an utterance, using contextual information and world

knowledge to work out what is being referred to and which way to understand ambiguous
expressions, such as the word last. Two possible contexts for using an utterance based on the
sentence in (A) will be considered. They lead to different explicatures.

Firstly, Ann sends a text message to Bess: “missed 10 pm bus” and Bess responds “That was the
last bus”. In this situation, Bess’s reply can probably be interpreted as meaning ‘that was the
final bus on tonight’s schedule going to where I know you were intending to travel’.

Secondly, Charley says to the driver of a bus about to pull out of a busy terminus: “Some of
these buses go via Portobello; is this one of them?” The driver’s hurried reply is “That was the
last bus”, probably interpretable as ‘The previous bus that departed from here was one of those
that goes via Portobello’.

These explicatures of utterances go beyond the literal meaning of the sentence That was the last
bus. They are interpretations based on the linguistic context (Ann’s and Charley’s utterances
respectively) and the non-linguistic context (it is late at night in Ann’s case; Charley and the bus
driver can both see bus after bus departing). Background knowledge comes in too (buses
generally stop running at some late hour; Bess knows where Ann was going and takes it that Ann
knows that she knows). Since context has to be considered, this is pragmatics. Context facilitates
disambiguation (between the ‘final’ and ‘previous’ meanings of last) and helps establish what
things are referred to when the second individual in each scenario uses the expressions “That”
and “the last bus”. As with other pragmatic interpretations, there are uncertainties over
explicature, which is why we used the word probably in both of the previous paragraphs.
In working out an implicature, we go further and ask what is hinted at by an utterance in its
particular context, what the sender’s “agenda” is. We would have to know more about the kind
of relationship that Ann and Bess have, and about Charley and the look on the driver’s face, but
if we had been participants in these exchanges we would have been able to judge fairly
confidently whether Bess’s reply conveyed sympathy or a reprimand or an invitation to spend the
night at her place, and whether the driver meant to convey annoyance or apology by his response
to Charley. Fairly obviously, the bus driver’s answer can be taken as an implicit ‘No’ in answer
to Charley’s question. These are inferences derived by trying to understand, in the light of
contextual and background information, the point of a sender producing utterances that, in
context, are likely to have particular explicatures. We cannot forget about the literal meaning of
the sentence in (A) because literal meaning is the foundation for explicature, on which
implicatures are based, but it is important to note that it cannot be claimed that the sentence That
was the last bus generally means ‘Spend the night at my place’ or ‘No’.

So utterance meaning is a necessary fiction that linguists doing semantics and pragmatics have to
work with. It is the meaning – explicature and implicatures – that an utterance would likely be
understood as conveying when interpreted by people who know the language, are aware of the
context, and have whatever background knowledge the sender could reasonably presume to be
available to the addressee(s). Utterances are the data for linguistics, so linguists,when, interested
in meaning want to explain utterance meaning.

When utterance is based upon sentence then we must peep into the concept of sentence….
  Sentence
Definition: 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.

.Rule: 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.

Example:
a) Helen rolled up the carpet
b) Helen rolled the carpet up (Different sentences)

a)Sincerity may frighten the boy

b)Sincerity may frighten the boy(Same sentences)
It would make sense to say that an utterance was in a particular accent (i.e. a particular way of
pronouncing words). However, it would not make strict sense to say that a sentence was in a
particular accent, because a sentence itself is only associated with phonetic characteristics such
as accent and voice quality through a speaker’s act of uttering it. 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.

A sentence is a grammatically complete string of words expressing a complete thought.

This very traditional definition is unfortunately vague, but it is hard to arrive at a better one for
our purposes. It is intended to exclude any string of words that does not have a verb in it, as well
as other strings. The idea is best shown by examples.

Example:

a) I would like a cup of coffee is a sentence.

b) Coffee, please is not a sentence.
c) In the kitchen is not a sentence.
d) Please put it in the kitchen is a sentence.
 A New Semantic Triangle
This tentative adjustment of C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards’Semantic Triangle to describe the
meaning of sentences can be shown as below:

    From the figure above the following can be drawn: A sentence is a statement of a proposition
and a representation of event through the proposition whereas a proposition is what a sentence
(statement) describes and a view of event. Therefore, we have a sequence as follows:
event>generalization> proposition>description>sentence.

The Five Types of Sentence Meaning

a) Proposition meaning
b) Connotative meaning
c) Cultural meaning
d) Structural meaning (including grammatical meaning and collocative meaning)
e) Pragmatic meaning.
   
 Proposition meaning  
    John gets up late.
    Does John get up late?
    John does not get up late.

The above three sentences, though different in forms (one is a statement, one an interrogation,
and one a negation) , have the same proposition:John gets up late.

 Connotative meaning

Which includes affective meaning, stylistic meaning and figurative meaning.

Today,you’re supposed to clean the home.

Aj tum ghr saf kro gi.

The English sentence above has a connotation of derogatory sense while the urdu one has a
connotation of commendatory sense.

 Cultural meaning

Which includes culture-specific meaning and culture-associative meaning.

Her heart is like a well with 15 buckets of which 7 come up and 8 go down.(She felt extremely
uneasy and restless.) 

 Structural meaning

which includes grammatical meaning and textual meaning. A simple sentence, also called an
independent clause, contains a subject and a verb, and it expresses a complete thought.
Some  students  like to study in the mornings. A compound sentence contains two independent
clauses joined by a coordinator.For example,  I tried to speak Spanish, and my friend tried to
speak English.  A complex sentence has an independent clause joined by one or more dependent
clauses. A complex sentence always has a subordinator such as because, since, after,
although, or when.For example,The teacher returned the homework after she noticed the error.

 Pragmatic meaning

which relates the overall situation with the speaker and the hearer. E.g. Behave yourself. (Parents
speaking to their children or the older people speaking to the younger ones.Here, the social status
and the age status are taken into consideration.)

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 whole sentences. The meanings of whole sentences involve propositions; the
notion of a proposition is central to semantics.What exactly a proposition is, is much debated by
semanticists.

 Proposition
Definition: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 expressions in the sentence
and the situation or action they are involved in. In uttering a declarative sentence a speaker
typically asserts a proposition.It contains predicate(Aspect of entity, quality, state, activity,
relation with other entity/ things)+Argument(entity,some sort of thing).

Rule: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.

Example

In the present-day world,

a) Is it a fact that there are lions in Africa? Yes / No

b) Is the proposition that there are lions in Africa a true proposition? Yes / No
c) Is it a fact that the state of Arkansas is uninhabited by human beings? Yes / No
d) Is the proposition that the state of Arkansas is uninhabited by human beings true? Yes /
No

One can entertain propositions in the mind regardless of whether they are true or false, e.g. by
thinking them, or believing them. But only true propositions can be known.

Example:If John wonders whether Alice is deceiving him, would it seem reasonable to say that
he has the proposition that Alice is deceiving him in his mind, and is not sure whether it is a true
or a false proposition? Yes / No

In our definition of ‘proposition’ we explicitly mentioned declarative sentences, but propositions

are clearly involved in the meanings of other types of sentences, such as interrogatives, which
are used to ask questions, and imperatives, which are used to convey orders. Normally, when a
speaker utters a simple declarative sentence, he commits himself to the truth of the
corresponding proposition: i.e. he asserts the proposition. By uttering a simple interrogative or
imperative, a speaker can mention a particular proposition, without asserting its truth. Example
In saying, ‘John can go’ a speaker asserts the proposition that John can go. In saying, ‘Can John
go?’, he mentions the same proposition but merely questions its truth.We say that corresponding
declaratives and interrogatives(and imperatives) have the same propositional content.

Propositions, 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. Example: English I am cold, French J’ai froid, German Mir ist kalt,
and Russian Mne xolodno can, to the extent to which they are perfect translations of each other,
be said to correspond to the same proposition. One may question whether perfect translation
between languages is ever possible. In point of fact, many linguists disagree about this and it is
likely that absolutely perfect translation of the same proposition from one language to another is
impossible. However, to simplify matters here we shall assume that in some, possibly very few,
cases, perfect translation is possible.

A comparative study

Utterance Sentence propositions

s

Can be loud or quiet + - -

Can be grammatical or not + + -

Can be true or false + + +

In a particular regional + - -
accent

In a particular language + + -

It is useful to envisage the kind of family tree relationship between these notions shown in the
diagram.
For example, a single proposition could be expressed by using several different sentences (say,
Prince William will inherit the throne, or The throne will be inherited by Prince William) and
each of these sentences could be uttered an infinite number of times.

A proposition is an abstraction that can be grasped by the mind of an individual person. In this
sense, a proposition is an object of thought. Do not equate propositions with thoughts, because
thoughts are usually held to be private, personal, mental processes, whereas propositions are
public in the sense that the same proposition is accessible to different persons: different
individuals can grasp the same proposition. Furthermore, a proposition is not a process, whereas
a thought can be seen as a process going on in an individual’s mind. Unfortunately, of course, the
word thought may sometimes be used loosely in a way which includes the notion of a
proposition. For instance, one may say, ‘The same thought came into both our heads at the same
time.’ In this case, the word thought is being used in a sense quite like that of the word
proposition. The relationship between mental processes (e.g. thoughts), abstract semantic entities
(e.g. propositions), linguistic entities (e.g. sentences), and actions (e.g. utterances) is problematic
and complicated.

Mental processes Thoughts

Abstract semantic entities Propositions

Linguistic entities Sentences

Actions Utterances
 To conclude,
To sum up: Utterances are real pieces of speech. By filtering out certain types of (especially
phonetic) information we can get to abstract grammatical elements, sentences. By going on to
filter out certain types grammatical information, we can get to propositions, which are
descriptions of states of affairs and which some writers see as a basic element of sentence
meaning. So the relationship between utterance, sentence and proposition can be illustrated as
utterance > sentence > proposition .
  References

 Books:

 An Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics by Pattrick Grifith

 Semantics(A Course Book) by James.R.Hurford,Brandon Heasly and

Michael.B.Smith

 George Yule’s Introduction to Linguistics

 Google Sites:

 Wikipedia.com

 Semantics study.com

 Language and semantic.org

 Goodreads.com

 Bookos.org

 Language’s meaning.com

 Slideshare.net

 Google Powerpoint Files on semantics