Semantic

SENTENCES AND THEIR CATEGORIES

            Based on their meanings,sentences can get classified into seven categories.The meaning of a sentences is not seen as a sum of the meaning of the words that make up the sentences.A sentences meaning is a unit of meaning that is carried by the whole sentences.They are as follows            :

1.      Analytic sentences

An analytic sentence is one which is necessarily true, because of the senses of the words in it.It means that the meaning of the sentences is found to be true according to the facts.Therefore,an analytic sentence can be judged true without recourse to real world knowledge separate from the sense of the words contained in it.

Example          :

v  “The fire is hot”

v  “My mother is a female”

v  “Cats are not fish”

v  “Elephants are animals”

2.      Contradictory Sentence

A contradictory sentence (or a contradiction) is a sentence which is necessarily false, because of the senses of the words in the sentence.It means that the meaning of the sentence is proved to be false according to the facts.

Example          :

v  “The river is bigger than the sea”

v  “The boy is pregnant”

v  “A man is a butterfly”

v  “Water is heavier than iron”

3.      Anomalous Sentence

An anomaly (anomalous sentence) is a sentence that is either a contradiction or nonsense.Nonsense is a sentence that follows grammatical rules but it notates the semantic rules.It means that nonsense is grammatically true but semantically wrong.The semantic properties of words determine what other words they can be combined with. A sentence widely used by linguistics illustrates this fact.

Example          :

v  Colorless green ideas sleep furiously

The sentence obeys all the syntactic rules of English. The subject is colorless green ideas and the predicate is sleep furiously. It has the same syntactic structure as the sentence Dark green leaves rustle furiously. But there is obviously something semantically wrong with the sentence. The meaning of colorless includes the semantic feature "without color," but it is combined with the adjective green, which has the semantic feature "green in color." How can something be both "without color" and "green in color"? This sentence violates what we know about semantic features and is, therefore, semantically anomalous.

4.      Synthetic Sentence

A Synthetic Sentence is sentence that is not an analytic.It is neither true nor false.The meaning of the sentence depend on the facts.We must know the facts than we can decide whether it is true of false.

Example          :

“Diana works hard”

The meaning of the sentence depends on the fact whether “Diana” as stated by the speaker really exist,or she really work hard.

5.      Uninterpretable Sentences

An uninterpretable sentece is that sounds like an English sentence but it makes no sense at all because it include words that have no meaning or word that do not belong to English. It may also happen to other languages.

Example          :

“The dak is vlaiying on the sekai”

The words used in the sentence above seem like English because the grammar is actually correct, but the content words in the sentence above are all senseless.

6.      Paraphrase

Paraphrase is the expression of the meaning of a word, phrase or sentence using other

words, phrases or sentences which have (almost) the same meaning (cf. Richards et al.,1992). Paraphrase involves a relation of semantic equivalence between syntactically different phrases or sentences (cf. Quirk et al., 1985).

Based on the definition above paraphrase is sentence having same meaning or part of the two sentences are synonymous.

Like synonymy, paraphrase is never perfect; there are always differences in emphasis

or focus. There are two kinds of paraphrase:

a.       Lexical paraphrase

When two sentences used synonymous words or use of a semantically equivalent term in place of another in a given context. This is also known as synonymy.

So, synonymy creates lexical paraphrase.

Example    :

“Denisa is beautiful”

“Denisa is pretty”   

The two sentences are paraphrases because the word “beautiful” is synonymous to the word “pretty”.Therefore,the meaning of two sentences are the same.

b.      Grammatical Paraphrase

It is the use of a phrase or sentence in place of another phrase or sentence semantically equivalent to it, although they have different syntactic structure.This type of paraphrase can be created through active/pasive contraction,elliptic contraction,introductory “it”,separable verb phrase,etc.

Example    :

v  John showed the pictures to me. John showed me the pictures.

v  My wallet was stollen by thieves. The thieves stole my wallet.

7.      Ambigous Sentence

One of the aspects of how meaning works in language which is studied most in semantics is ambiguity. Ambiguity is the property of having two or more distinct meanings or interpretations (cf. Cipollone et al., 1998).A sentence is ambiguous when it has two or more possible meanings. Ambiguity can be caused by factors such as homonymy, polysemy,lack of sufficient context,etc.There are two kinds of ambiguity, lexical ambiguity and structural or grammatical ambiguity.

a.       Lexical Ambiguity

A sentence is lexically ambiguous when it can have two or more possible meanings due to polysemous (words that have two or more related meanings) or homophonous (a single word which has two or more different meanings) words.

Example    :

“Prostitutes appeal to the Pope”.

This sentence is ambiguous because the word 'appeal' is polysemous and can mean 'ask for help' or 'are attractive to'.

b.      Structural/Grammatical Ambiguity

A sentence is structurally ambiguous if it can have two or more possible meanings due to the words it contains being able to be combined in different ways which create different meanings.To know this kind of ambiguity we must observe whether the sentence has more than one structures or not.

Example    :

“The chicken is ready to eat”

The sentence may mean : “The chicken is ready to eat something.” And “the chicken is ready so we can eat it.”

CONCLUSION

            Sentences is not only the sum of meaning of the word that make up the sentence.So,adding together the meanig of its word will not produce the full meaning of sentence.The mening of a sentence is also determined by the relationship of words in the sentence as well as the context in which the sentence is used.Sentences have seven categories. There are Analytic sentence,contradictory sentence,anomalous sentence,synthetic sentence,uninterpretable sentence,parapharse and ambigous sentence.

REFERENCES

Semantic handbook by Drs.Sugianto

http://public.wsu.edu/~gordonl/S05/256/sententialsemantics.htm

http://emedia.leeward.hawaii.edu/hurley/Ling102web/mod43_semantics/4mod4.3.4_compositional.htm

http://www.usingenglish.com/forum/linguistics/112088-ambiguous-sentences.html