Meaning of Meaning

Semantics Assignment

Summary of Utterances, Sentences, Propositions and Meaning

Utterances

Utterances are the most concrete and noticeable among those four terms which are used to describe different levels of language. An utterance is produced by speaking (or writing) a piece of language. For example, when I say together, we are invincible. This categorize as one utterance. If another person in the same room also says together, we are invincible, and then we would be dealing with two utterances.

Sentences

Sentences are abstract grammatical elements obtained from utterances. Sentences are abstract because if a first and second person in the room say together, we are invincible with the same intonation, we will want to say that we have met two utterances of the sentences. Therefore, sentences are abstracted, or generalized, from actual language use. One example of this abstraction is direct quotation. If someone reports He said “Together, we are invincible”, she is unlikely to mimic the original speaker exactly. Usually the reporter will use her normal voice and thus filter out types out certain types of information. Speaker seems to recognize that at the level of the sentence these kinds of information are not important, and so discard them. So we can look at sentences from the point of view of the speaker, where they are abstract elements to be made real by uttering them; or from the hearer’s point of view, where they are abstract elements reached by filtering out certain kinds of information from utterances.

Propositions

Propositions can be described as the way of capturing part of the meaning of sentences. They are more abstract than sentences because the same proposition can be represented by several different statements. Moreover in non-statements like questions, orders, etc. they cannot be the complete meaning since such sentences include an indication of the speaker’s attitude to the propositions.

Further step of abstraction is possible for special purposes: to identify propositions in trying to establish rules of valid deduction, logicians discovered that certain elements of grammatical information in sentences were irrelevant. For example, the difference between active and passive sentences; Israel invades Palestine and Palestine is invaded by Israel. From a Logician’s perspective, these sentences are equivalent. Thus the grammatical differences between them will never be significant in a chain of reasoning and can be ignored. These sentences seem to share a description of the same state of affairs. If one is true all are true, if one is false all are false. To capture this fact, logicians identify a common proposition. Such a proposition can be represented in various special ways to avoid confusion with the various sentences which represent it

Some semanticists have borrowed from logicians both this notion of proposition and the use of logical formulae. As we shall see, some linguists employ this notion of proposition in their semantics analysis, often to identify a description of an event or situation which might be shared element in different sentences. For example, the statement Harry kicked the ball, the question Did Harry Kick the ball?, and the command Harry, Kick the ball! Those sentences might be seen to share a propositional element: HARRY KICK THE BALL. In this view, these different things with the same proposition: to assert it as a past event; to question it; or to request someone to bring it about.

Meaning

In linguistics, meaning is what the source or sender expresses, communicates, or covey in their message to the observer or receiver, and what the receiver infers from the current context.

According to Herbert Simon, Simon's basic thesis is that the meaning of a word, phrase, or sentence is to be found in the pattern of activations between neurons (rather, "symbol structures" at some aggregate level of analysis) that reading or hearing the expression induces. From the side of the originator, the meaning is that pattern of activations which induced the production of that particular expression. This point of view has some interesting consequences for interpretation and pedagogy that perhaps have been underappreciated. It especially makes clear that the linguistic, historical, and environmental context within which a phrase is received has a direct impact on the meaning of the phrase; furthermore, what follows the phrase is also part of the context, also helping to fix its meaning (disambiguate its interpretation).

Many descriptions and definitions are delivered by many linguists. The meaning of meaning is still debatable, because meaning has no concrete form. Meaning is more abstract than sentences and even propositions. One utterance may have more than one meaning. Sometimes, the meaning beyond one utterance depends on each of every people perspectives. However, the real meaning of meaning is still unrevealed by any linguist experts.

Name              : Hari Subagyo

Student’s No   : D05209036  

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