ENG508 Grand Quiz Preparation Set 2

“Every Next level” · of life will demand a different · *YOU* · ***The Capt.’s have generated*** · all the possible key points

OF

“Semantics and Pragmatics” ENG508

FOR

Grand Quiz 2020

Special thanks to our mentor “Maha Malik”

“Sibtain Mumta z” · “Nagina Fawad” · “Maliha Mubarik” · “Anny Adeel” · “Rizwana Aslam” · “Anum khan” · “Nimrah Khalid” · Lesson 10

•  Montague (1974) has hypothesized that the tools of logic can help us to represent sentence meaning. The study of logic comes down from the Classical Greek world, famously from Aristotle.
•  The beginnings of logic lie in a search for the principles of valid argument and inference.
•  A part of this study is a concern for the truth of statements and whether truth is preserved or lost by putting sentences into different patterns.
•  Truth here is taken to mean a correspondence with facts, or the correct description of the states of affairs in the world.
•  Mostly, the truth is said to be empirical as we need some facts of the world to know whether a statement is true or not.
•  For instance, the truth of the sentence ‗My father was the first man to visit Mars‘ depends on the facts about the life of speaker‘s father:
•  If her father did go to Mars and was the first man there then the sentence is true; otherwise, it is false. Similarly, the empirical truth of ‗the earth revolves around the sun‘ depends upon the facts of the universe..
•  The term propositional logic‘ is also known as ‗propositional calculus‘ and ‗sentential calculus‘.
•  Here, we are concerned with the relations that hold between sentences, involving complex sentences, irrespective of the internal structure of the sentences themselves.
•  For example, we have two sentences i.e. ‗John is in his office‘ and ‗John is at home‘. Between them, one is true; if the second is false, it can be concluded that the first is true.
•  This conclusion can be drawn irrespective of the form of the sentences themselves.
•  Semanticists call a sentence‘s being true or false based on its truth value, and call the facts that would have to obtain in reality to make a sentence true or false, its truth conditions.
•  The study of the truth behavior of sentences with quantifiers e.g. ‗all, every, each, some, one‘ gave rise to predicate logic.
•  The propositional logic cannot account for inferences that depend upon relations within sentences and cannot deal with an example such as ‗All men are mortal‘, ‗Socrates is a man‘, ‗and therefore, Socrates is mortal‘.
•  For this we need ‗predicate logic‘ or ‗predicate calculus‘, but as we need to deal with relations between sentences, predicate logic is not wholly distinct from propositional logic, but includes it.
•  It is possible to symbolize this with M(a), where M stands for the predicate ‗is a man‘ and (a) refers to the individual ‗John‘.
•  We can extend this symbolism to deal with relations where more than one individual is concerned.
•  Thus ‗John loves Mary‘ may be symbolized as L(a, b), where L stands for the predicate ‗loves‘ and (a) and (b) for ‗John‘ and ‗Mary‘.
•  Entailment defined by truth – ―A sentence p entails a sentence q when the truth of the first (p) guarantees the truth of the second (q), and the falsity of the second (q) guarantees the falsity of the first (p).
•  Assuming as usual that the same individual is denoted by ‗the emperor‘ here, there are a number of ways of informally describing this relationship.
•  If somebody tells us ‗a‘ and we believe it, then we know ‗b‘ without being told any more. Or it is impossible for somebody to assert ‗a‘ but deny ‗b‘.
•  What such definition have to try to capture is that entailment is not an inference in the normal sense:
•  we do not have to reason to get from ‗a‘ to ‗b‘, we just know it instantaneously because of our knowledge of English.
•  This is seen as a matter of meaning or semantics, since, it is claimed, to know the meaning of the sentence is to know the conditions under which it is true.
•  Tarski‘s (1956:155) definition is a true sentence is one which states that the state of affairs is so and so, and the state of affairs is so and so‘.
•  For instance, ‗Snow is white‘ if and only snow is white.
•  In fact, he proposed this as the basis of a theory of truth, but it is easy to see how it can be converted into a theory of meaning.
•  At first, this dictum may seem to be completely uninformative. Of course, snow is white if snow is white. But that misses the point of what is being suggested.
•  This makes sense only if we clearly distinguish between the sentence that we are talking about (object language) and what we are saying about it(meta-language).
•  Thus, we match a bit of language with a set of conditions in the world, and it does not matter if the words ‗snow is white‘ appear in both (object language and metalanguage) in this case, English.
•  However, much of the work in truth-conditional semantics is of a highly technical nature, and it cannot be rightly evaluated without a detailed exposition.