Semantics: a coursebook, second edition
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(6) John killed Bill, who remained alive for many years after A / S / C Feedback (1) C (2) A (3) S (4) S (5) A (6) C Comment Analytic sentences can be formed from contradictions, and vice versa, by the insertion or removal, as appropriate, of the negative particle word not. We pay no attention here to the figurative use of both analytic sentences and contradictions. Taken literally, the sentence That man is not a human being is a contradiction. This very fact is what gives it its power to communicate a strong emotional judgement in a figurative use (stronger than, say, the synthetic That man is very cruel). We will now mention a limitation of the notions analytic, synthetic, and contradiction. Remember that these notions are de fined in terms of truth. Imperative and interrogative sentences cannot be true or false, and so they cannot be analytic (because they cannot be true), or synthetic, because ‘synthetic’ only makes sense in contrast to the notion ‘analytic’. You will have noticed that synthetic sentences are potentially informative in real-world situations, whereas analytic sentences and contradictions are not informative to anyone who already knows the meaning of the words in them. It might be thought that the fact that semanticists concentrate attention on unusual sentences, such as analytic ones and contradictions, re flects a lack of interest in ordinary, everyday language. Quite the contrary! Semanticists are interested in the foundations of everyday communication. People can only communicate meaningfully about everyday matters, using informative synthetic sentences, because (or to the extent that) they agree on the meanings PA RT T H R E E . . . to sense 98 of the words in them. This basic agreement on meaning is re flected in analytic sentences, which is what makes them of great interest to semanticists. The notions analytic, synthetic, and contradiction each apply to individual sentences. Analyticity, syntheticity, and contradiction are, then, sense properties of sentences. Example That man is human has the sense property of analyticity (or of being analytic). That man is tall has the sense property of syntheticity (or of being synthetic). That man is a woman has the sense property of being a contradiction. Practice (1) Does the analyticity of That man is human depend in some crucial way on a semantic relationship between the sense of man and that of human? Yes / No (2) Which of the following statements seems to express this semantic relationship between man and human correctly? Circle your choice. (a) The sense of man includes the sense of human. (b) The sense of human includes the sense of man. (c) The sense of man is identical to the sense of human. (3) Does the semantic relationship that exists between man and human also exist between man and tall? Yes / No (4) Does the absence of this semantic relationship between man and tall account for the fact that This man is tall is not analytic, like This man is human? Yes / No Feedback (1) Yes (2) (a) (3) No (4) Yes Comment Note the interdependence of sense relations and sense properties. Sense properties of sentences (e.g. analyticity) depend on the sense properties of, and the sense relations between, the words they contain. The sense relation between the predicates man and human is known as hyponymy, a kind of sense inclusion relationship between predicates which we will explore further in Unit 10. The sense relation between the predicates man and woman is a kind of antonymy, or oppositeness, which we will explore further in Unit 11. The sense structure of a language is like a network, in which the senses of all elements are, directly or indirectly, related to the senses of all other elements in these and other kinds of ways. For the rest of this unit, we will explore a limitation in the idea of sense, a limitation which is quite parallel to a limitation in the idea of extension, pointed out in the previous unit (Unit 8). For convenience, we repeat below our statement of the relationship usually envisaged between sense and extension. A speaker’s knowledge of the sense of a predicate provides him with an idea of its extension. We said earlier that another way of talking about this relationship is that the sense of a predicate determines or ‘ fixes’ the extension |