Compositional Procedure

 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 "My wife bought a coat in London", "buy" is the two place predicate whose arguments are represented by "my wife" and "coat".

Thus, a predicate is the nucleus of a proposition, usually a verb, some times an adjective. A predicate will have a number of arguments associated with it. 

Eg: The predicate "propose" normally has two arguments; "actor" (the proposer) and "undergoer" (the proposition); the predicate "fond" has two arguments; the "experiencer" (who has feelings of fondness) and the "goal" (the object of the fond feelings). 

Argument is an entity associated with a predicate. 

For eg: The predicate "throw" has three arguments; the "actor" (the thrower), the "patient"  or ""undergoer (the thing thrown), and the "goal" (where it is thrown).

One place predicate takes only one argument.

Eg: The verb "disappear" in "The butterflies disappeared", or the adjective, if adjectives are so described, in "The water is cold". One place predicate has the reference of an "intransitive verb"

Two place predicate takes two arguments.

Eg: "see' in "I saw Bill" (with arguments I and Bill) or "angry" in "I was angry with Bill". Two place predicate has reference of a "transitive verb".

Predicate Logic

Predicate Logic allows us to decompose, simpler sentence into smaller parts. Predicate Logic provides a tool to handle expression of generalization, that is, quantificational expression.

    a) Every cat is sleeping                                                                                                                                b) Some girl likes David                                                                                                                                c) No one is happy

It allows us to talk about variable pronouns. The values for the pronoun is some individual in the domain of the universe that is contextually determined. 

    a) It is sleeping                                                                                                                                              b) She likes David                                                                                                                                          c) He is happy.

Sentences with quantificational expression can be divided into two interpretive components.

Every cat is sleeping }                             is sleeping                                                                                     It                    }                                        is sleeping

"X" is a cat, "x" is sleeping.

It is true if "It is sleeping" is true for all possible values for it in the domain.

Some girl likes David    }            likes David

She                                 }            likes David

For "some" is "x", "x" is a girl, "x" likes David.

This is true if "She likes David" is true for at least one possible value for she.

Prepared by

Dr. Susan Mathew



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