It´s a Semantic content of a clause That means that any proposition (deep structure/meaning) can be expressed in different forms. Focus on Semantics.

Presentación del tema: "It´s a Semantic content of a clause That means that any proposition (deep structure/meaning) can be expressed in different forms. Focus on Semantics."— Transcripción de la presentación:

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3 It´s a Semantic content of a clause That means that any proposition (deep structure/meaning) can be expressed in different forms. Focus on Semantics

4 IN SIMPLE WORDS PROPOSITION IS: AN AFFIRMATION OF AN IDEA OR A STATEMENT

5 NO MATTER WHAT LANGUAGE Spanish: Toca el piano English: She plays the piano German: Sie sind sehr freundlich! Swahili: Ninakupenda

6 There are four main arguments for denying that it is sentences which are true or false and for introducing the apparatus of propositions to stand as the bearers of truth.

7 Firstly, "sentence" is a grammatical concept and not all grammatically well-formed sentences appear to express anything which is capable of being true or false : for example, "All green ideas sleep furiously". This sentence is grammatically well-formed, but clearly meaningless. Some sentences, we shall say, do not express any proposition at all.

8 Secondly, some sentences are ambiguous. We normally explain this by saying that one sentence (string of words) is capable of expressing more than one proposition : for example, "Flying aeroplanes can be dangerous", which can mean either that being a pilot can be a dangerous activity, or that aeroplanes can be dangerous when they are flying about in the sky.

9 Thirdly, different sentences can have the same meaning. We would normally think of translation from one language to another to be possible because sentences from different languages can express the same proposition: for example, "It is raining", "Il pleut" and "Es regnet".

10 Fourthly, we tend to think that there is some meaning in common between the indicative, interrogative and imperative sentences in the table below, and this is normally explained by differentiating their propositional content.

11 Definition: An account of the number of arguments that a predicate has. A description of the semantic potential f predicates in terms of the number and types of arguments which may co-occur with them. It is snowing. Valency zero A window broke. Valency one Tom broke a window. Valency two

12 Valency Zero It refers to the predicate that has no particular subject. In this case the verb contains a zero-argument verb. Valency one: one-argument predicates contain a verb that has a subject but no object which means it is an intransitive verb. The argument contains a subject and a predicate in the roles of: actor/action affected/event theme/description theme/identity Valency two: The sentences having subject and object both are known to have two- argument predicates. The arguments may occur in the role of: Agent/action/affected Agent/action/effect Actor/action/place Affecting/affect/affected Affected/affect/affecting Theme/link/associate