#TeamEnglish@CMS_Kottayam: The learner in me, hand in hand with the teacher in you!

  Propositions (statement) A sentence or statement viewed from the perspective of its meaning is called proposition. A proposition is a technical term used by philosophers, and they distinguish it from a sentence (syntactic entity) and a statement (a unit of pragmatics). Hence, for example, the same proposition might be said to be expressed by both "I understand French" and in Italian, ""Ca pisco il Francese". It is a property of propositions that they have truth values. Thus, this proposition would have the value "true" if the speaker did understand French and the value "false" if the speaker did not understand, that is, "positive proposition" (yes) or "negative proposition" (no). The "propositional content" of a sentence is that part of its meaning which is seen, in some accounts, reducible to a proposition. Eg: The porters had shut the gates.                                  ...

 Compositional Procedure Principle of Compositionality is the principle that the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its constituent expressions and the rules used to combine the,. This principle is called Frege's Principle after Gottlob Frege.  The principle of compositionality states that in a meaningful sentence, if the lexical parts are taken out of the sentence, what remains will be the rules of composition. Eg: The sentence "Socrates was a man". Once the meaningful lexical items are taken away - "Socrates" and "man"- what is left is the "pseudo sentence", "Socrates was a Man". The task becomes a matter of describing what the connection is between Socrates and man. The meaning of a complex expression is uniquely determined by the meaning of its constituents and the syntactic construction used to combine them. Predicate A verb or other unit which takes a set of arguments within a sentence. Eg: In ...

Truth Conditional Semantics/ Formal Semantics Artificial theory of semantics that is based on the notion of truth. By "truth conditions", we mean "the conditions under which a sentence, or a proposition is expressed by it, is true". Eg: "I have red hair" is true under the condition that the speaker has, in fact, red hair. Truth Conditional Semantics is an account of the truth conditions of sentences, often one in which the meaning of a sentence is equated with them, that is, it is the study of the propositional meaning of utterances (is from the perspective of meaning) and the logical conditions for establishing their truth or otherwise.  Truth Conditional Semantics is concerned with how languages relates to reality, the other theories like componential theory, is concerned with exploring the conceptual structure which underlies language. This is conceptual structure which underlies language. This is so because the other theoretical approaches see human be...

 Semantic Theories Semantic theories are based on three approaches: Structuralist (form) Logical Generative Some linguists have named the logical approach as premise, that is, a statement or an idea that forms the basics for a reasonable line of argument. The basic semantic theories are: a) Analytical/ Referential Approach Analytical or Referential Approach has been formulated by Saussure b) Distributional Approach Distributional Approach studies the structural treatment of linguistic meaning.  We cannot find two words in any language sharing exactly the same lexical environment (distribution). So, this approach studies meaning as syntagmatic (collocations) and paradigmatic (sets) relations. Paradigmatic relations deals with the lexical meaning of the words of the same lexical set. Lexical meaning is the dictionary meaning. c) Operation (Contextual/ Functional) Approach In this approach, we study meaning or concept as a set of operations. The real meaning of a word is underst...

Componential Analysis The theory that the meanings of words can be analysed into a finite number of reusable semantic components. For eg: The meaning of vixen could be said to have the following components: [mammal],  [+ adult], [- male], [+ vulpine]. These sense of each unit is distinguished from others by a set of semantic features/components. Prototypes An approach to word meaning that regards semantic categories as fuzzy and suggests that for any word we have a notion of what is prototypical about its meaning., so that some instances will fall centrally into the category, while others will be more peripheral, into the category.  Eg: A prototypical tree  has a trunk, branches, twigs and leaves; but there are cases where we might call something a tree, even though it doesn't have all the prototypical features. Eg: Rose tree (as against rose bush ). Implicature By "implicature", semantists mean something that is stated obliquely rather than directly, so that the hearer h...

I. Semantic Theories Sense and Reference Sense: The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics explains sense as: A meaning of a lexical unit distinguishes, e.g. in a dictionary, from other meanings. Thus "chair" has one sense when it is used to refer to a piece of furniture and another when used to refer to someone chairing a meeting. The place of a lexical unit within the semantic meaning system of a language. Eg: That of "chair" is defined by the relations that distinguish it from "furniture", from "armchair", from "table", and so on.  The meaning of an expression as distinct from its reference. Thus, in a famous eg: of the philosopher G. Frege, the "morning star" and the "evening star" have the same referent (the planet Venus) but differ in sense. Gottlob Frege, the father of modern mathematical logic, and also considered one of the founders of analytic philosophy, developed the distinction between sense and refere...

George Bernard Shaw's  Saint Joan (Segment IV) (Source courtesy:  Cliffnotes ) THE PREFACE Shaw often writes a lengthy preface to his plays for his readers in which he will comment on matters in the play or matters relevant to it. The Preface to   Saint Joan   is one of Shaw's longer ones and presents again many of his views of the personage of Joan from a more objective point of view. The Preface is divided into forty-one sub-sections, which could be loosely divided into the following categories for discussion: (A) Sections 1-16: Various Views of the Historical Joan (B) Sections 17-21: Misrepresentations of Joan in Literature and in Relation to Medieval Society and the Medieval Church (C) Sections 22-34: The Nature of Joan's Death in Relation to Modern Acts of Inhumanity (D) Sections 35-41: The Nature of Historical Drama and   Saint Joan viewed as a Tragedy A - Sections 1 – 16: Various Views of the Historical Joan 1.      Joan ...