Muchamad Adam Basori, M.A. TESOL
12 November 2011
Meeting Unit 9
Background
Which of the following is correct? Circle your answer.
(a) The sense of any word is its dictionary definition, in the form of a complete set of necessary and sufficient conditions for its use.
(b) The sense of a predicate is the set of all things it can be correctly applied to.
(c) The sense of a predicate is its indispensable hard core of meaning.
Are the following sentences analytic (A), synthetic (S), or a contradiction (C)?
(a) John is simultaneously a man and not a human being. A / S / C
(b) Mussolini was an Italian. A / S / C
(c) Every female dog is a bitch. A / S / C
Introduction
In previous units you were introduced to the notion of sense. We now proceed to the examination of sense relations. What we have referred to previously as the sense of an expression is the whole set of sense relations it contracts with other expressions in the language.
We will mainly be concerned with the sense relations which involve individual predicates and whole sentences.
Synonymy
SYNONYMY is the relationship between two predicates that have the same sense.
For example, In most dialects of English, stubborn and obstinate are synonyms. In most dialects of Javanese, tuku and tumbas are synonyms.
In the following sentences, do the capitalized pairs of words have the same (or very nearly the same) sense in the ways they are used here?
(1) The thief tried to CONCEAL/HIDE the evidence. Yes / No
(2) I’m going to PURCHASE/BUY a new coat. Yes / No
(3) These tomatoes are LARGE/RIPE Yes / No
(4) This is a very LOOSE/SHORT definition Yes / No
(5) You have my PROFOUND/DEEP sympathy Yes / No
(6) It is a very WIDE/BROAD street Yes / No
(1) Yes (2) Yes (3) No (4) No (5) Yes (6) Yes
Clearly the notions of synonymy and sense are interdependent. You can’t understand one without understanding the other. These concepts are best communicated by a range of examples. In general, when dealing with sense relations, we shall stick to clear cases.
In considering the sense of a word, we abstract away from any stylistic, social, or dialectal associations the word may have. We concentrate on what has been called the cognitive or conceptual meaning of a word.
Example
àHow many kids have you got?
àHow many children have you got?
Here we would say that kids and children have the same sense, although clearly they differ in style, or formality.
Exercise
In the following sentences, do the pairs of words in capitals have the same sense? (They do seem to differ in their dialectal, stylistic, or social associations.) Circle S for ‘same’ or D for ‘different’.
(1) He comes to see us every FALL/AUTUMN S / D
(2) Nothing is more precious to us than our FREEDOM/LIBERTY S / D
(3) The body was found in the BOOT/TRUNK of the car S / D
(4) We’ve just bought a new HOUSE/APARTMENT S / D
(5) John got a bullet wound in his HEAD/GUTS S / D
(6) A BLOKE/CHAP I know has pickled onions for breakfast S / D
1) S (2) S (3) S (4) D (5) D (6) S
Synonymy is a relation between predicates, and not between words (i.e. word-forms). Recall that a word may have many different senses; each distinct sense of a word (of the kind we are dealing with) is a predicate.
Example
When necessary, we distinguish between predicates by giving them subscript numbers. For example, hide1 could be the intransitive verb, as in Let’s hide from Mummy; hide2 could be the transitive verb, as in Hide your sweeties under the pillow; hide3 could be the noun, as in We watched the birds from a hide; and hide4 could be the noun, as in The hide of an ox weighs 200 lbs. The first three senses here (the first three predicates) are clearly related to each other in meaning, whereas the fourth is unrelated. It is because of the ambiguity of most words that we have had to formulate practice questions about synonymy in terms of sentences. The sentence The thief tried to hide the evidence, for example, makes it clear that one is dealing with the predicate hide2 (the transitive verb). Hide2 is a synonym of conceal.
Comment
The definition of synonymy as a relationship between the senses of words requires a clear separation of all the different senses of a word, even though some of these senses may be quite closely related, as with hide1, hide2, and hide3, mentioned in the last comment.
Comments
All the examples so far have been of synonymy between predicates realized grammatically by a word of the same part of speech, for example between adjective and adjective, as with deep and profound.
But the notion of synonymy can be extended to hold between words of different parts of speech, for example between the verb sleeping and the adjective asleep. Examples like these are not the kind usually given of synonymy, but they help to make the point that the sense of a word does not depend entirely on its part of speech. Grammar and meaning are separate though closely related aspects of language.
Sameness of meaning?
Let us now investigate how the notion of ‘sameness’ of meaning, which we referred to as synonymy in the case of individual predicates, can be extended to entire sentences in a language.
è PARAPHRASE
Definition
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 red haired girls is a paraphrase of Girls with red hair are preferred by unmarried men
Look at the following pair of sentences, which are paraphrases of each other.
(A) John sold the book to a grandson of W.B. Yeats
(B) A grandson of W.B. Yeats bought the book from John
It is not possible for (A) to be true while (B) is not (assuming that we are dealing with the same John and the same grandson of W.B. Yeats).
Thus (A) has the same truth value as (B), so that if (A) is true, (B) is true, and vice versa; also, if (A) is false, then (B) is false, and vice versa.
Definition
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.
For 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).
Comments
Note that the superordinate term, red, is more general or inclusive in meaning than its hyponym scarlet, which is much more specific in the kind of colour it describes. In other words, the predicate red describes a particular region in colour space whose prototype (or focal) examples are fairly distinct from those of other colours, though we have seen that more peripheral members of the extension of red tend to fade into other colours.
Comments (Contd.)
But the term also subsumes (includes) more specific kinds of red within this region of colour space, some of which have their own predicates to describe the narrower sort of hue, including scarlet, crimson, etc.
In general, sense relationships involving hyponymy are usually structured in this way, with the superordinate term more abstract, general, or schematic than its hyponyms.
E.g. Emotion à fear, love, hate, happiness, sadness, anger, ...
Inclusion or Exclusion?
Before we leave the discussion of hyponymy, a note should be made of its relationship with extension.
Hyponymy is a sense relation. Another term for sense, preferred by logicians, is intension, a term deliberately chosen for its implicit contrast with extension. Hyponymy is defined in terms of the inclusion of the sense of one item in the sense of another. We say, for example, that the sense of animal is included in the sense of cow.
Continued…
This inclusion can be shown roughly by a diagram giving a list of the ‘sense-components’ of cow. It
will be seen that this list includes the component ‘animal’.
Sense of cow à animal à sense of animal
bovine
female
But paradoxically, if we draw a diagram of the extensions of cow and animal, the inclusion relationship appears the other way around.
The set of all cows
The set of all animals
Let’s practise….
(1) Which of the following descriptions is the more specific?
(a) A man, 5ft 8in tall, with black hair, moustache, no beard, wearing a beige duffle coat, blue jeans, and lace-up shoes
(b) A man in a duffle coat (a) / (b)
(2) Which of the above descriptions gives more information? (a) / (b)
(3) Which of the above descriptions describes more men? (a) / (b)
(4) In general, does giving more information increase or reduce the range of things described?...............
Answers & Comments
(1) (a) (2) (a) (3) (b) (4) It reduces the range of things described.
We define HYPONYMY in such a way that SYNONYMY counts as a special case of hyponymy.
For example, given two synonyms, such as mercury and quicksilver, we say for convenience that these also illustrate the hyponymy relationship, and that mercury and quicksilver are hyponyms of each other.
Thus synonymy can be seen as a special case of hyponymy, i.e. SYMMETRICAL HYPONYMY.
Rule…..!
If X is a hyponym of Y and if Y is also a hyponym of X, then X and Y are synonymous.
Comments
Earlier in this unit we saw that it is possible to extend the notion of ‘sameness’ of meaning between predicates (synonymy) to sameness of meaning between propositions that are expressed by sentences (paraphrases).
Similarly, the notion of hyponymy, which involves meaning inclusion between individual predicates, can be extended to a particular kind of meaning inclusion between propositions in a language involving truth conditions called ‘entailment’.
Definition
A proposition X ENTAILS a proposition Y if the truth of Y follows necessarily from the truth of X.
We extend this basic definition in terms of propositions to cover SENTENCES in the following way. A sentence expressing proposition X entails a sentence expressing proposition Y if the truth of Y follows necessarily from the truth of X.
Example
John ate all the kippers (X) entails Someone ate something (Y).
John killed Bill (X) entails Bill died (Y).
It is not possible to think of any circumstances in which sentence X is true and sentence Y false.
Summary
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.
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