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Sense Properties and Stereotypes

The document discusses different types of sense properties and relationships between words and sentences. It defines analytic, synthetic, and contradictory sentences based on whether they are necessarily true or false due to the senses of the words. Synonymy is when two predicates have the same sense, while hyponymy is when one predicate's meaning is included within another's. Homonymy occurs when a word's different senses are unrelated, while polysemy involves closely related senses. Structural ambiguity arises from a sentence's structure, and lexical ambiguity from an ambiguous word.

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Kholidyan Nugrahadi Putra
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306 views

Sense Properties and Stereotypes

The document discusses different types of sense properties and relationships between words and sentences. It defines analytic, synthetic, and contradictory sentences based on whether they are necessarily true or false due to the senses of the words. Synonymy is when two predicates have the same sense, while hyponymy is when one predicate's meaning is included within another's. Homonymy occurs when a word's different senses are unrelated, while polysemy involves closely related senses. Structural ambiguity arises from a sentence's structure, and lexical ambiguity from an ambiguous word.

Uploaded by

Kholidyan Nugrahadi Putra
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Sense properties and stereotypes

The SENSE of an expression is its indispensable hard core of meaning. The sense of an
expression can be thought of as the sum of its sense properties and sense relations with other
expressions. For the moment, we will concentrate on three important sense properties of
sentences, the properties of being analytic, of being synthetic, and of being contradictory.

An ANALYTIC sentence is one that is necessarily TRUE, as a result of the senses of the
words in it. An analytic sentence, therefore, reflects a tacit (unspoken) agreement by speakers
of the language about the senses of the words in it.

A SYNTHETIC sentence is one which is NOT analytic, but may be either true or false,
depending on the way the world is.

Example

Analytic: All elephants are animals. The truth of the sentence follows from the senses of
elephant and animal.

Synthetic: John is from Ireland. There is nothing in the senses of John or Ireland or from
which makes this necessarily true or false.

Analytic sentences are always true (necessarily so, by virtue of the senses of the words in
them), whereas synthetic sentences can be sometimes true, sometimes false, depending on the
circumstances.

A CONTRADICTION is a sentence that is necessarily FALSE, as a result of the senses of the


words in it. Thus a contradiction is in a way the opposite of an analytic sentence.

Example

This animal is a vegetable is a contradiction. This must be false because of the senses of
animal and vegetable.

Both of John’s parents are married to aunts of mine is a contradiction. This must be false
because of the senses of both parents, married, and aunt.

A NECESSARY CONDITION on the sense of a predicate is a condition (or criterion) which


a thing MUST meet in order to qualify as being correctly described by that predicate.

A SUFFICIENT SET OF CONDITIONS on the sense of a predicate is a set of conditions (or


criteria) which, if they are met by a thing, are enough in themselves to GUARANTEE that
the predicate correctly describes that thing.
SENSE RELATIONS IDENTITY AND SIMILARITY OF SENSE

SYNONYMY is the relationship between two predicates that have the same sense

Example

 In most dialects of English, stubborn and obstinate are synonyms.

 In many dialects, brigand and bandit are synonyms.

 In many dialects, mercury and quicksilver are synonyms.

A sentence which expresses the same proposition as another sentence is a PARAPHRASE of


that sentence(assuming the same referents for any referring expressions involved). Paraphrase
is to SENTENCES (on individual interpretations) as SYNONYMY is to PREDICATES
(though some semanticists talk loosely of synonymy in the case of sentences as well)

Example : Bachelors prefer redhaired girls is a paraphrase of Girls with red hair are preferred
by unmarried men

HYPONYMY is a sense relation between predicates (or sometimes longer phrases) such that
the meaning of one predicate (or phrase) is included in the meaning of the other.

Example: The meaning of red is included in the meaning of scarlet. Red is the superordinate
term; scarlet is a hyponym of red (scarlet is a kind of red).

Hyponymy and synonymy are sense relations between predicates. The latter is a special,
symmetric, case of the former. Entailment and paraphrase are sense relations between
sentences, the latter being a special, symmetric case of the former. The sense relations
between predicates and those between sentences are systematically connected by rules such
as the basic rule of sense inclusion. These sense relations are also systematically connected
with such sense properties of sentences as ANALYTICITY and CONTRADICTION.

A case of HOMONYMY is one of an ambiguous word whose different senses are far apart
from each other and not obviously related to each other in any way with respect to a native
speaker’s intuition. Cases of homonymy seem very definitely to be matters of mere accident
or coincidence.

Examples

 Mug (drinking vessel vs gullible person) would be a clear case of homonymy.

 Bank (financial institution vs the side of a river or stream) is another clear case of
homonymy.

There is no obvious conceptual connection between the two meanings of either word.
A case of POLYSEMY is one where a word has several very closely related senses. In other
words, a native speaker of the language has clear intuitions that the different senses are
related to each other in some way.

Example : Mouth (of a river vs of an animal) is a case of polysemy.

The two senses are clearly related by the concepts of an opening from the interior of some
solid mass to the outside, and of a place of issue at the end of some long narrow channel.

Polysemy in nouns is quite common in human languages. Some additional examples will be
given for you to think about in the exercises at the end of this unit.

A sentence which is ambiguous because its words relate to each other in different ways, even
though none of the individual words are ambiguous, is STRUCTURALLY (or
GRAMMATICALLY) AMBIGUOUS.

Example : The chicken is ready to eat (and many of the other sentences we have used) is
structurally ambiguous.

Any ambiguity resulting from the ambiguity of a word is a LEXICAL AMBIGUITY.

Example : The captain corrected the list is lexically ambiguous.

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