Speaker meaning is what a speaker means when he uses a piece of language.

Sentence meaning (word meaning) is what a sentence means.

An utterance is any stretch of talk, by one person, before and after which there is silence on the
part of that person.
An utterance is the use by a particular speaker, on a particular occasion, of a piece of language,
such as a sequence of sentences, or a single phrase, or even a single word.
A sentence is a string of words put together by the grammatical rules of a language.
A proposition is that part of the meaning of the utterance of a declarative sentence which
describes some state of affairs.
2 sentences which have the same proposition are called paraphrase.
Proposition does not involve grammar, just to convey message. It can be true or false. It does not
involve language because no matter what language you speak, you see the situation similarly.
For 1 proposition, it can be expressed in many sentence.
Reference and sense
By means of reference, a speaker indicates which things in the world (including persons) are being
talked about.
Reference is a relationship between parts of a language and things outside the language (in the
world)
The same expression can, in some cases, be used to refer to different things. These expressions in a
language can have variable reference.
E.g. The phrase the present President of the United States :
- in 2007: George W. Bush
- in 1996: Bill Clinton
There are cases of expressions never refer to different things, they have constant reference.
E.g. the moon, the people’s Republic of China, Angola, Halley’s Comet
Two different expressions can have the same referent. They have co-reference.
E.g. Both the phrases the Morning Star and the Evening Star refer to the planet Venus.
Sense: the relationship within words
Sense is not about object, it’s about meaning.
Every expression that has meaning has sense, but not every expression has reference.

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A proposition is that part of the meaning of the utterance of a declarative sentence which
describes some states of affairs.
Harry took out the garbage has the same proposition as Harry took the garbage out.
Isobel loves Tony and Tony loves Isobel don’t.
John can go has the proposition of John can go. Can John go? Questions the truth.  Have the same
propositional content.
For 1 proposition, it can be expressed in many sentences.
Utterances Sentences Propositions
Can be loud or quiet + - -
Can be grammatical or not + + -
Can be true or false + + +
In a particular regional accent + - -
In a particular languge + + -

REFERRING EXPRESSION is any expression used in an utterance to refer to something or

someone (or a clearly delimited collection of things or people), i.e. used with a particular referent
in mind.
E.g. The name Fred in “Fred hit me” is a referring expression.
But Fred in “There’s no Fred at this address” is not a referring expression.
Indefinite noun phrase
A man was in here looking for you last night.  “A man” is a referring expression.
 To sum up, whether an expression is a referring expression or not is heavily dependent on the
linguistic context and on circumstances of the utterance.
An EQUATIVE SENTENCE is one which is used to assert the identity of the referents of two
referring expressions, i.e. to assert that two referring expressions have the same referent.
 Tony Blair is the Prime Minister.
 That woman over there is my daughter’s teacher.
A feature of many equative sentences is that the order of the two referring expressions can be
reversed without loss of acceptibility.
 The largest city in Africa is Cairo.
 Cairo is the largest city in Africa.

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However,
 A pint of Guinness is what I need.  What I need is a pint of Guinness.
 Not equative.
 That is the man who kidnapped my boss.  The man who kidnapped my boss is that.
 Equative

A GENERIC SENTENCE is a sentence in which some statement is made about a whole unrestricted
class of individuals, as opposed to any particular individual.
The whale is a mammal.
The whale over there is a mammal.  not a generic sentence.
(P. 65) DEIXIS
A DEICTIC WORD is one which taes some element of its meaning from the context or situtaion (i.e.
the speaker, the addressee, the time and the place) of the utterance in which it is used.
DEFINITENESS is a feature of a noun phrase selected by a speaker to convey his assumption that
the hearer will be able to identify the referent of the noun phrase, usually because it is the only
thing of its kind in the context of the utterance, or because it is unique in the universe of discourse.
That book is definite. It can only appropriately be used when the speaker assumes the hearer can
tell which book is being referred to.
She, The Earth,…
“The whale is a mammal” – The whale is not definite, because there is in fact no referent.
SENSE PROPERTIES OF SENTENCES.
The SENSE of an expression is its indispensable hard core of meaning.
An ANALYTIC sentence is one that is necessarily TRUE, as a result of the senses of the words in it.
An analytic sentence, therefore, reflects a tacit (unspoken) agreement by speakers of the language
about the senses of the words in it.
An SYNTHETIC sentence is one which is NOT analytic, but may be either true or false, depending
on the way the world is.
Analytic: All elephants are animals.
Synthetic: John is from Ireland. (There is nothing in the senses of John or Ireland or from which
makes this necessarily true or false.
A CONTRADICTION is a sentence that is necessarily FALSE, as a result of the senses of the words
in it. Thus a contradiction is in a way the opposite of an analytic sentence.
Both of John’s parents are married to aunts of mine.

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 Analytic sentences can be formed from contradictions, and vice versa, by the insertion or
removal, as appropriate, of the negative particle word not.
Imperative and interrogative sentences cannot be true or false, so they cannot be analytic, or
synthetic.
Synthetic sentences are potentially informative.
THE INTERDEPENDCE OF SENSE RELATIONS AND SENSE PROPERTIES.
SENSE RELATIONS BETWEEN WORDS
 SYMNONYMY: is the relationship between two predicates (not words) that have the same
sense.
A sentence which expresses the same proposition as another sentence is a PARAPHRASE of
that sentence.
 Hyponymy: is a sense relation between predicates (or sometimes longer phrases) such that
the meaning of one predicate (or phrase) is included in the meaning of the other.
The meaning of “red” is included in the meaning of “scarlet”.
 Red is the SUPERORDINATE term; scarlet is a HYPONYM of red.
 Synonymy can be seen as a special case of hyponymy: SYMMETRICAL HYPONYMY.
 A proposition X entails a proposition Y if the truth of Y follows necessarily from the truth of
X. (If X is a hyponymy of Y, the sen A entails sen B)
 John killed Bill entails Bill died.
Relation between pairs of Relation between pairs of
sentences words
Not necessarily symmetric entailment hyponymy
Symmetric paraphrase synonymy

Given two negative sentences A and B, identical in every way except that A contains a word X
where B contains a different word Y, and X is a hyponym of Y, then sentence B entails sentence
A.
Henry was not chewing a flower entails Henry was not chewing a tulip.
Gradable words like big, tall, small, expensive, etc.
John saw big mouse and John saw a big animal.  There are no entailment relations between
these sentences. Thus although a mouse is an animal, a big mouse is not a big animal.
ANTONYMY
Binary antonyms are predicates which come in pairs and between them exhaust all the
relevant possibilities. (mutually exclusive)
dead – alive; male – female
Converses: If a predicate describes a relationship between two things and some other
predicate describes the same relationship when the two things are mentioned in the opposite

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 order, then the two predicates are converses of each other.
parent – child (X is the parent of Y and Y is the child of X)
own – belong to
below – above
Two predicates are GRADABLE antonyms if they are at opposite ends of a continuous scale of
values (a scale which typically varies according to the context of use)
hot – cold; tall – short; clever – stupid
A test for gradability: very, or how? (p.125)
Multiple incompatibles (non-binary)
set of more than 2 members covering an entire semantic features.
A–B–C
If sth is A  It can’t be B or C.
If sth is not A  It must be B or C.
If it’s not a dog, it must be any.
HOMONYMY AND POLYSEMY (P.130)
Homonymy (từ đồng âm, khác nghĩa) is one of an ambiguous word whose different senses are far
apart from each other and not obviously related to each other in any way with respect to a
native speaker’s intuition.
bat: a flying creature – bat: a stick used in sports
A case of POLYSEMY is one where a word has several very closely related sense. The difference
senses are related to each other in some way. (Có thể liên tưởng nghĩa này qua nghĩa khác)
face of a person, and face of a mountain/building
A sentence which is ambiguous because its words relate to each other in different ways, even
though none of the individual words are ambiguous, is STRUCTURALLY (or GRAMMATICALLY)
AMBIGUOUS.
Any ambiguity resulting from the ambiguity of a word is a LEXICAL AMBIGUITY.