Lecture 14

Sentence-meaning.

Main points:

1. Relations of words and sentence to one another.

2. Utterance, sentence and proposition.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The goal of semantic in the view of majority of linguistics 1) to show how words and sentences are “... related to one another in terms of such notions as “synonymy”, “entailment” and “contradiction”” (Lyons, 1970, 166) and 2) to “... explain how sentences of a language are understood, interpreted and related to states processes and objects in the universe” (Bierwisch, 1970, 167).

Translators and linguists are in substantial agreement that both orientations to the description and explanation of “meaning” are necessary. Of the two, the translator particularly needs the second: that of the formal structures of the code to the communicative context of use.

1. Relations of words and sentence to one another.

Our early discussion of word-meaning was to show relationships of inclusion and exclusion between concepts and, hence, between the words which express them. Similar relationships can be found between sentences.

The next step is to use the notion of equivalence (one of the key concepts in translation theory) to relate one sentence to another through the study of the meaning of the word in the linguistic co-text of the sentence and that sentence-meaning depends on the setting of the sentence in its communicative context. The reader needs to be able to work out whether what is stated in a sentence is true or false, whether it possesses a single meaning or is ambiguous and , indeed, whether it “makes sense” at all. After all, the whole of the “meaning” of a text is not (and cannot be) spelled out in actual written sentences.

Sentence-meaning, like word-meaning, can be approached initially through the notions of inclusion and exclusion and the discovery of the sentence level equivalents of hyponymy, synonymy and antonymy.

There exist eight distinct kinds of sentence relationship (Hurford and Heasley) :

1. Analytic sentence

2. Synthetic sentence

3. Contradiction

4. Ambiguity

5. Anomaly (nonsense)

6. Entailment (те, що тягне за собою)

7. Implicature (те, що має на увазі)

8. Presupposition (припущення)

Thus we moved on from word-meaning to introduce the topic of sentence-meaning and the meaning relationships which hold within and between sentences.

2. Utterance, sentence and proposition.

We must now return to the distinction between utterance , sentence and proposition - three levels of abstraction and idealization which apply to any stretch of language we may wish to translate.

There is a type-token relationship between the three, such that we can envisage the most abstract (the proposition) as being an ideal underlying type of which there are a number of tokens (ознака) or manifestations: a range of sentences which share the same propositional content. Equally, the same relationship holds between sentence and utterance. Each sentence can be viewed as an ideal type which can be realized by a range of actual utterances; tokens of it. In linguistics, the distinction is crucial and can be exemplified by de Saussure’s langue-parole and the similar, though not identical , distinction between competence and performance in Chomsky. Are we translating propositions, sentences or utterances? And , the related question, “What is the implication of choosing one rather than the other?” This being so, it is essential to be clear in distinguishing the three concepts.

a) The utterance can be typified as being concrete and context-sensitive. It is the utterance and not the sentence that is recorded on paper or in audio tape and it is tied to a specifiable time, place and participants. It is acceptable .

b) The sentence in contrast, is abstract and context - tree. Unlike utterances , sentences exist (if at all) only in the mind. When a sentence is said or written down , we still tend to refer to it as a sentence. The written sentence is better thought of as an utterance of a text. In contrast with the utterance, the sentence is not set in time or space nor tied to any particular participants: speakers, hearers, writers, readers. It is language specific since it is judged in terms of grammaticality , i. e. whether it conforms to the rules of the particular linguistic code and whether , in those terms, it is possible.

c) The proposition (твердження) is even more abstract than the sentence. It is the unit of meaning which constitutes the subject-matter of a sentence. It has been defined as “that part of the meaning of the utterance of a declarative sentence which describes some state of affairs and, hence, in uttering a declarative sentence, a speaker is asserting a proposition.

Being even more abstract than the sentence , the proposition is not only context-free but also language-free in the sense that it cannot be tied to any specific language. An utterance can be said or written in any language and recognized as a realization of a sentence of that particular language. The fact that the proposition is universal (not tied to a specific Language but underlying all languages) gives it its central position in communication and provides us with a major clue in our attempts at making sense of the process of translation.

There is a relationship of hyponymy between the superordinate proposition and the subordinate sentence and utterance: proposition includes sentence and utterance, and sentence includes utterance.