This practical coursebook introduces all the basics of semantics in a simple, step- by-step fashion. Each unit includes short sections of. This elementary coursebook has been carefully planned to introduce students by discovering the value and fascination of studying semantics, and move on to. : Semantics: A Coursebook (): James R. Hurford, Brendan Heasley, Michael B. Smith: Books.

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Practice 1 In which of the following sentences does the predicate male function as a predicator? In each case, write down the single word or part of a word which carries courdebook most specific information. Yes I No 2 If I say to you, ‘If Mary came to the party, Phyllis must have been upset’, do I thereby put in your mind semwntics proposition that Mary came to the party, without necessarily indicating whether it is true or not? Yes I No 2 Do the two sentences in 1 have the same sense?

Semantics: A Coursebook – James R. Hurford, Brendan Heasley, Michael B. Smith – Google Books

In this way, it is similar to the grammatical term ‘subject’: Feedback Comment Lewis Carroll had brilliant insights into the nature of meaning and into the foibles of people who theorize about it. Return to Book Page. Each unit of the course includes sematics sections of explanation and exemplification followed by stimulating practice exercises for the student to complete. The present unit will act as a bridge between the preceding units on reference and the following units on sense, introducing several notions, including extension and prototype, which in certain ways bridge the conceptual and theoretical gap between sense and reference.

Example ‘Help’ represents an utterance. Practice Are the following generic sentences? If there had been two women in the room, and no other indication were given, the referent of She could not be uniquely identified.

John represents a word conceived as part of a sentence. In everyday discourse almost all of the fixing of reference comes from the context in which expressions are used. Semanics discussion of derivation in Unit 19 has been substantially expanded beyond the treatment of this topic in the first edition to include hurfodd detailed information about morphology and its rela- tion to meaning. Assume that this sentence is uttered by a particular person on a particular occasion to pick out a particular tree.

English the, German der, or French le have a different kind of meaning from proper names, common nouns, prepositions, and conjunctions. Account Options Sign in.


Yes I No 8 If perfect communication is to take place between speaker and hearer on any topic, is it necessary that they share the same universe of discourse? Pamela considered the proposition that her mother was alive and realized that it could not possibly be true. Yes I No 3 Is the phrase the whale semantically definite in the sentence mentioned i.

Understanding the mechanisms of meaning is vital to successful human communication, so convey to your students the everyday significance of the xii How to use this book examples.

Other definitions could yield different results. In subsequent units 1 we will develop the idea of sense in similar detail. T don’t live in this house any more’ 2 John: That is, in the previous ‘comment’ paragraph, this page refers to the physical sheet of paper numbered We say that the British national anthem is used to refer to a particular song, that eleven hundred is used to refer to a particular number, one o’clock to a particular time, 93 million miles to a particular distance, and so hurflrd.

Think of such contexts for practice. Any change in the words, or in their order, makes a different sentence, for our purposes. Popular passages Page 1 – I don’t know hurrord you mean by ‘glory,’ ” Alice said. Practice 1 How many referring expressions are there in Philip is handsome 7. The notion of context is very flexible even somewhat vague.

We have already seen an example of this when we said it was sensible to talk of a huford being in a particular language, and also sensible to talk of an utterance being in a particular language, although one cannot talk of a proposition being huford a particular language.

The result is a kind of ‘Tarzan jungle talk’, e. Each unit builds on previous units, so it is wise to work through it systematically from the beginning.

Yes I No 7 At what point does this conversation switch from an exchange of uninformative statements to an exchange of informative statements? In addition to deictic words such as here, now, come, and bringthere are in English and other languages certain grammatical devices called tenses for indicating past, present, and future time, which must also be regarded as deictic, because past, present, and future times are defined by reference to the time of utterance.

One thing we would recommend, as you proceed through this book, is that you take a positively critical semmantics to the ideas being put forward. Yes I No 8 Are there new techniques, invented outside the immediate domain of the map-maker, available to the modern mapmaker, but unavailable to the ancient mapmaker?


In talking of sense, we deal with relationships inside the language; in talking of reference we deal with the relationships between language and the world.

In generic sentences Unit 6for example, and in other cases, one can find a phrase beginning with the where the nurford cannot be expected to identify the referent, often because there is in fact no referent, the expression not being a referring expression.

What would happen if this were the case? Comment on the following examples, making reference to concepts introduced in this unit. Notice also that the verb be in its hurord forms is, was, are, were, am is not the swmantics in any example sentence that we have seen so far.

Be sure to change the deictic expressions as needed. In the light of the preceding questions, does the reference of an expression vary according to a the circumstances time, place, etc. We shall now explore the way in which language creates unreal worlds and allows us to talk about non-existent things.

Semantics: A Coursebook

But we will use the term ‘predicate’ in a semantic sense, to be defined below, developed within Logic. There are as many potential referents for the phrase your left ear as there are people in the world with left ears. Practice Imagine two different everyday situations in which separate couples are having separate conversations about what they refer to with the phrase the moon. These are nouns such as father, son, brother, mother, daughter, neighbour.

For instance, one may say, ‘The same thought came into both our heads at the same time. Example I would like a cup of coffee is a sentence. We shall have a lot to say in later units about utterances, sentences and propositions, since these concepts are at the bottom of all talk about meaning.

Bush, the former Governor of Texas, etc. So we insist as in 2 above that the English conjunction and, for example, could never be a referring expression. Practice 1 Can you tell by itself whether the sentence You are standing on my toe is true or false?