SENTENTIAL MEANING

the meaning of sentence is built, in part, from the meaning of noun phrase and
verb phrases– the Principle of Compositionality again.
Adverbs may add to or qualify the meaning.
Example: The boy found the ball yesterday specifies a time component to the meaning
of the boy’s finding the ball.
Adverbs such as quickly, fortunately, and often would affect the meaning in other ways.

THE “TRUTH” OF SENTENCES

Declarative sentence permits you to know under what circumstances that sentence is
true.
“Circumstances” are called the truth conditions of the sentence.
The truth conditions of a declarative sentence are the same as tho sense of the
sentence.
Examples:
The Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776. TRUE
The Declaration of Independence was signed in 1976. FALSE

The fifteenth Pope of the Catholic Church.

The moon is made up of green cheese.

Rufus believes that the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1976.

PARAPHRASE
two sentences are paraphrase if they have the same truth condition.
whenever one is true, the other is true and one is false ,the other is false, without
exception.

The horse threw the rider.

The rider was thrown by the horse.
-active-passive like this examples are often paraphrases, but not always. When
quantifiers are involved—words like every, each, few and several—an active and its
corresponding passive may have different truth conditions; that is, they may not be
paraphrases.
Example:
Every person in this room speaks two languages.
Two languages are spoken by each person in this room.
-these two sentences do not have the same truth conditions; they are not
paraphrases..

Here are some other sets of paraphrases involving more or less the same vocabulary in
different syntactic structures.
It is easy to play sonatas on this piano.

This piano is easy to play sonatas on.

On this piano it is easy to play sonatas.

Sonatas are easy to play on this piano.

Booth assassinated Lincoln.

It was Booth who assassinated Lincoln.

It was Lincoln who was assassinated by Booth.

The person who assassinated Lincoln was Booth.

Students gave money to the beggar.

The students gave the beggar money.

Paraphrase may also arise with certain semantic concepts such as “ability,”
“permission,” and “obligation.”
May be expressed through auxiliary verbs:
He can go.
He may go.
He must go.
They may also be expressed phrasally, without the auxiliaries:
He is able to go./He has the ability to go.

He is permitted to go/He has permission to go.

He is obliged to go./He has an obligation.

It is often possible to substitute a phrase for a word without affecting the sense of the
sentence,
John saw Mary.
John perceived Mary using his eyes.

The professor lectured the class.

The professor delivered a lecture to the class.

ENTAILMENT
Sometimes knowing the truth of one sentence entails,or necessarily implies, the truth of
another sentence. For examples,if you know that it is true that
Corday assassinated Marat.

then you know that it is true that

Marat is dead.
It is logically inconsistent for the former to be true and the latter false. The the sentence
Corday assassinated Marat entails the sentence Marat is dead
The brick is red entails The bricks is not white;
Mortimer is a bachelor entails Mortimer is male.

-this entailment is part of the semantic rules we have been discussing. Much of
what we know the world comes from knowing entailments of true sentence
CONTRADICTION
Negative entailment: that is, the truth of one sentence necessarily implies the falseness
of another sentence.

Elizabeth is a Queen of England.

Elizabeth is a man

Scott is a baby.
Scott is an adult.

If the first sentence of each pair is true, the second is necessarily false. This relationship
is called contradiction because the truth of one sentence contradicts the truth of the
other.

EVENTS VS. STATES

Some sentences describe events, such as John Kissed Mary, or John ate oysters.
These differences appear to have syntactic consequences.
Eventive sentences sound natural when passivized, when express progressively, when
used imperatively, and with certain adverbs.
Eventives
Mary was kissed by John.
John is kissing Mary.
Kiss Mary!
John deliberately kissed Mary.
Oyster were eaten by John.
John is eating oyster.
Eat oysters!
John deliberately ate oysters.
Statives
?Mary is known by John.
?John is knowing Mary.
?Know Mary!
?John deliberately knows Mary.
?Oyster are liked by John.
?John is liking oysters.
?Like oysters!
?John deliberately likes oysters.

PRONOUNS AND COFERERENTIALITY

Another example of how syntax and semantics interact has to do with reflexive pronoun
such as herself and themselves.
The meaning of a reflexive pronoun always refers back to some antecedent.
In Jane bit herself ,herself refers to Jane.
Syntactically, reflexive pronouns and their antecedents must occur within the same S in
the phrase structure tree.
Sentence structure plays a role in determining when a pronoun and a noun
phrase in different clauses can be conferential.
John believes that he is a genius.

He believes that John is a genius.

The fact that he is considered a genius brothers John

To Mean or not to Mean

Anomaly expressions that appear to follow the rules of syntax, but go awry semantically:
metaphor, or nonliteral, indirect but often creative meaning, and idioms, wherein the
meaning of an expression is unrelated to the meaning of its parts, though it is
conventionally understood.
If in a conversation someone said to you,
My brother is an only child.

The sentence,
That bachelor is pregnant

The semantic property of words determine that other words they can be combined with.
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Dark green leaves rustle furiously.

Other English “sentences” make no sense at all because they include “words”
that have no meaning; they are uninterpretable . They can be interpreted only if some
meaning for each nonsense word can be dreamt up.
Lewis Caroll’s “Jabberwocky” is probably famous poem in which most of
the content words have no meaning—they do not exist in the lexicon of the grammar.
Still, all the sentences
“sound” as if they should be or could be English sentences:
“Twas brilling, and the slihty loves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

He took his vorpal sword in hand:

Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood while in thought.

Without knowing vorpal means you nevertheless know that

He took his vorpal sword in hand

means the same thing as

He took his sword, which was vorpal, in hand.

It was in his hand that he took his vorpal sword.
The semantic property of words shows up in other ways in sentence construction. For
examples, if the meaning of word includes the semantic property “human” in English, we
can replace it by one sort of pronoun but not another. This semantic feature determines
that we call a boy he and a table it and not vice versa.

According to Mark Twain, Eve had such knowledge in her grammar, for she writes in
her diary:
If this reptiles is a man, it ain’t an it ,is it? That wouldn’t be grammatical, would it? I think
it would be he, In that case one would parse it thus:nominative he:
dative,him;possessive, his’n

Semantic violations in poetry may form strange but interesting aesthetic images, as in
Dylan’s Thoma’s phrase a grief ago. Ago is ordinary used with words specified by some
temporal semantic feature:
A week ago *a table ago
An hour ago but not *a dream ago
A month ago *a mother ago
A century ago

When Thomas used the word grief with ago he was adding a durational feature to grief
for poetic effect.
In the poetry of e.e. cummings there are phrases like,

the six subjunctive crumbs twitch.

a man . . .wearing, a round jeer for n hat.
children building this rainman out of snow.

Though all of these phrases violates some semantic rules, we can extend them,
it is the breaking of the rules that creates the imagery desired.

Anomaly occurs in many ways in language. It may involve contradictory semantic

properties, nonsense words, violations of semantic rules and so on. The fact that we are
able to understand, or at least interpret, anomalous expressions, and at the same time
recognize their anomalous nature, demonstrates our knowledge of the semantic
systems and semantic properties of the language.