Semantics: a coursebook, second edition
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(3) Imagine again the situation where you and I are in a room with a man and a woman, and I say to you (making no visual gesture), ‘She stole my wallet’. Would you be able to identify the referent of She? Yes / No Feedback (1) Yes (if equating it with the speaker of the utterance is regarded as su fficient identification). (2) In many situations it can, but not always. (We usually, but not always, know who is being addressed.) (3) Yes (that is, in the situation described, if I say to you, ‘She stole my wallet’, you extract from the referring expression She the predicate female, which is part of its meaning, and look for something in the speech situation to which this predicate could truthfully be applied. Thus in the situation envisaged, you identify the woman as the referent of She. If there had been two women in the room, and no other indication were given, the referent of She could not be uniquely identi fied.) Comment To sum up, predicates do not refer. But they can be used by a hearer when contained in the meaning of a referring expression, to identify the referent of that expression. Some more examples follow: Practice (1) Does the phrase in the corner contain any predicates? Yes / No (2) Is the phrase the man who is in the corner a referring expression? Yes / No (3) Do the predicates in the phrase in the corner help to identify the referent of the referring expression in (2) above? Yes / No (4) Is the predicate bald contained in the meaning of the bald man? Yes / No (5) Is the predicate man contained in the meaning of the bald man? Yes / No U N I T 6 Predicates, referring expressions, and universe of discourse 59 Feedback (1) Yes (in and corner) (2) Yes (We say that the phrase in the corner is embedded in the longer phrase.) (3) Yes (4) Yes (5) Yes Comment Speakers refer to things in the course of utterances by means of referring expressions. The words in a referring expression give clues which help the hearer to identify its referent. In particular, predicates may be embedded in referring expressions as, for instance, the predicates man, in, and corner are embedded in the referring expression the man in the corner. The correct referent of such a referring expression is something which completely fits, or satis fies, the description made by the combination of predicates embedded in it. We now introduce the notion of a generic sentence. So far, we have developed an analysis of a very common sentence type, containing a subject, which is a referring expression, and a predicate (and possibly other expressions). Not all sentences are of this type. Practice (1) In The whale is the largest mammal (interpreted in the most usual way) does the whale pick out some particular object in the world (a whale)? Yes / No (2) So is The whale here a referring expression? Yes / No (3) In The whale is the largest mammal does the largest mammal refer to some particular mammal? Yes / No (4) So are there any referring expressions in The whale is the largest mammal? Yes / No Feedback (1) No (2) No (3) No (4) No Definition A GENERIC SENTENCE is a sentence in which some statement is made about a whole unrestricted class of individuals, as opposed to any particular individual. Example The whale is a mammal (understood in the most usual way) is a generic sentence. tải về 1.74 Mb. Chia sẻ với bạn bè của bạn:
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