Meaning

Deictics  Are words, phrases and features of grammar that have to be interpreted in relation to the situation in which they are uttered such as “me” the sender of this utterance or “here” the place where the sender is.  “The first tutorial will be held next week”  Refer to example 1.11, page 14.

Different kinds of deixis  Time : now, soon recently, ago, tomorrow, next week  Place: here, there, two kilometers away, that side, this way, come, bring, upstair  Participants, persons and other entities: she, her, hers, him, his, they, it, this, that  Discourse itself: this sentence, the next paragraph, that was what they told me, I want to remember this.

Proposition  Different sentences can carry the same meaning as in a. Sharks hunt seals. b. Seals are hunted by sharks. c. Seals are prey to sharks. d. These chase and kill these others.  Is the term for a kind of core sentence meaning, the abstract idea that remains the same in cases as shown in example above.  It is very abstract, not tied to particular words or sentences: the proposition carried in examples above can be expressed without using the verb “hunt”.

Compositionality  Aims to explain the meaning of each sentence as arising from, on the one hand, the meaning of its parts and, on the other, the manner in which the parts are put together.  The meaningful parts of a sentences are clauses, phrases and words: and the meaningful parts of words are morphemes.  Refer to page 18 for examples

Entailment  An important type of inference in semantics. While the pragmatic inferences called explicatures and implicatures.  It is a guarantee.  logical implication holding two sentences to be true. The other one proceeds from the other.  NOTE: Refer to examples 1.19 and 1.20 on page 20  When the truth of one sentence guarantees the truth of another sentence, we say that there is a relation of entailment. a. The park wardens killed the bear. b. The bear is dead. a. Prince is a dog. b. Prince is an animal.

Summary of chapter 1  Pragmatics is about how we interpret utterances and produce interpretable utterances, either way taking account of context and background knowledge.  Explicature is the basic stage of pragmatic interpretation, involving disambiguation and working out what is being referred to.  Referring and understanding other people’s acts of reference usually require us to use and pragmatically interpret deictic words, ones that have meanings tied to the situation of utterance.  Semantics is the study of context-independent knowledge that users of a language have a word and sentence meaning.  The meaning of constructions are compositionally assembled out of the meanings of smaller units, and what comes into the scope of which operations can influence the meaning of a construction.  Semantics is descriptive and not centrally concerned with how words came historically to have the meanings they do.  The central kind of inference in semantics is entailment. Entailments are propositions guaranteed to be true when a given proposition is true, though we can, loosely, think of entailing as connection between sentences.

Exercises  Answer the exercise from 1 to 7 on page 22