Chapter I
Introduction
One of the branches of linguistics is
semantic that studying about meaning of sentence. It typically focuses on the
relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and
what they stand for. Linguistic semantics is the study of meanings that humans
use language to express. Other forms of semantics include the semantics of
programming languages, formal logics, and semiotics.
The formal study of semantics intersects
with many other fields of inquiry, including lexicology,
syntax,
pragmatics,
etymology
and others, although semantics is a well-defined field in its own right, often
with synthetic properties.[4]
In philosophy of language, semantics and reference
are related fields. Further related fields include philology,
communication,
and semiotics.
The formal study of semantics is therefore complex
The sentence can
be grouped into a paragraph. The sentences must have correlation, so it will
have one meaning in paragraph. Studying semantic is very important because we
should know the exact meaning of sentences. Sometimes, understanding the
meaning of sentences is hard because they have special meaning. The meaning of
sentence can be ambiguity, so we should elaborate it more. Moreover, if we want
to make a statement, other people should understand it, so we can convey our
message. Conveying our message needs special knowledge. Moreover, one of the
skills of linguistics is combining phones becomes morphemes, then combining the
morphemes becomes word, than combining the words becomes sentence. Actually, we
often need to take some ideas in one sentence. Linguistics also has knowledge
about it that is called discourse meaning. In semantic, we learn about it.
There are some kinds of discourse meaning. They are text-sentences (sense of
sentence), differences of text (sequences of sentences) and context, utterance
meaning and context, \ ,
Chapter II
Discussion
Discourse is combining some sentences. Sometimes, we have an idea and want to share
to other people. Conveying the idea
usually need an explanation. The
explanation is not enough to explain in one sentence. Therefore, we must add another sentence to
explain the idea, so other people will understand about it. In this case, we
need discourse to combine the sentence so that it will be meaningful. Discourse
meaning is a part of semantic that is discussed about the meaning of discourse.
This is the definition of discourse from some expert:
1. Crystal :
Discourse is a term used in linguistics to refer to a
continuous stretch of language larger than a
sentence.
2. Fromkin :
Linguistic knowledge accounts for speakers’ ability to
combine phonemes
into morpheme, morpheme into word, and word into sentences. Knowing a language
also permits combining sentences together to express complex thought and ideas.
This linguistic ability makes language an excellent medium for communication.
These larger linguistic units are called discourse.
3. Frances Henry and Carol Tator: Discourse is the way in which language is used
socially
to convey broad historical meanings. It is
language
identified by the social conditions of its
use, by who is using it
and under what conditions.
Language can never be
'neutral' because it bridges
our personal and social
worlds.
Kinds of discourse meaning
a. Text-sentences
The term
text-sentence for this more concentrates sense of ‘sentence’ –the sense in
which sentences are a subclass of utterance-inscriptions and, such, may happen
(in some language at least) as entire texts or segments of text. Utterances are
grammatically incomplete but it is meaningful. This will let us say that the
utterance of a particular system-sentence. Example:
‘I have not met
Dina’, will result, in some contexts, in the production of a text sentence,
such as ‘I have not met Dina’ (with or without the construction of have not to
haven’t).
It has been
stated that the utterance of sentence is not necessary a sentence. This can be
illustrated with reference to utterance of ‘I have not met Dina’. Suppose we
are faced with the following text, either it is spoken or written:
·
Have you met Dina?
·
I haven’t.
·
Dila hasn’t either.
·
She is never here when she should be.
The first and perhaps the fourth are complete
sentences. On the other hand, the second and the third are elliptical sentence-fragment.
Ø I haven’t is utterance and the complete sentence is ‘I
have not met Dina’.
Ø Dila hasn’t either is utterance and the original sentence
is ‘Dila has not met Dina.’
Ø She is never here when she should be is maybe the
utterance and it is respect to ‘Dina
is not here when
she should be here.
It is important
to realize that, even though it has introduced a certain amount of technical
terminology to handle the requisite theoretical difference, the difference
themselves are actual in everyday experience of the use of language.
We have no
difficulty in determining that ‘I haven’t’ has the proportional content ‘ I
have not met Dina’ in one context, of ‘I have not been to Jakarta’ in another
‘I have not got any money’ in yet a third, and so on. In fact, out of context
‘I haven’t’ is infinitely ambiguous. In context, I haven’t’ loses it ambiguity
merely in so far as it is possible to say which of the infinitely many
sentences of English (with the suitable grammatical structure) have been
uttered (lyons, 1995).
b. What
is a text? and What is text?
A text is a
sequence of sentence. From the viewpoint of semantics (and pragmatic) text and
context are complementary. This answer is clearly unsatisfactory – if
‘sentence’ means, as it must be in this context, text sentence. The finite
majority of every day colloquial texts are made up of combination of sentence,
sentence fragments, and ready-made locutions. Nevertheless, this defect in the
definition of ‘text’ that has just been given is merely one aspect of a more serious
deficiency: its unsuccessful to make explicit the fact that the units to which
a text is composed, whether they are sentences or not, are not merely strung
together in sequence, but must be related in some contextually appropriate way.
The text as a whole must show the connected, but distinguishable, properties of
cohesion and coherence (lyons, 1995).
Cohesion and coherence
a)
Coherence
Coherence in linguistics
is what makes a text semantically meaningful. It is especially dealt with in text
linguistics. Coherence is achieved through syntactical
features such as the use of
anaphoric and cataphoric
elements or a logical tense structure, as well as presuppositions
connected to general world knowledge. The purely linguistic elements that make
a text coherent are subsumed under the term cohesion.
However, those text-based
features which provide cohesion in a text do not necessarily help achieve
coherence, that is, they do not always contribute to the meaningfulness of a
text, be it written or spoken. It has been stated that a text coheres only if
the world around is also coherent.
Robert De Beaugrande and Wolfgang U. Dressler define coherence as a
“continuity of senses” and “the mutual access and relevance within a
configuration of concepts and relations”. Thereby a textual world is created
that does not have to comply with the real world. But within this textual world
the arguments also have to be connected logically so that the reader/hearer can
produce coherence.
"Continuity of senses"
implies a link between cohesion and the theory of Schemata initially proposed
by Bartlett in 1932 which creates further implications for the notion of a
"text". Schemata, subsequently distinguished into Formal and Content
Schemata (in the field of TESOL by Carrell & Eisterhold in 1983) are the ways in
which the world is organized in our minds. In other words, they are mental
frameworks for the organization of information about the world. It can thus be
assumed that a text is not always one due to the fact that the existence of
coherence is not always a given. On the contrary, coherence is relevant because
of its dependence upon each individual's content and formal schemata.
Syntactical
features
1.
Endophora
Endophora is a term that means an expression which refers to
something intralinguistic, i.e. in the same text.
Example:
"I saw Sally yesterday.
She was lying on the beach".
"she" is an
endophoric expression because it refers to something already mentioned in the
text, i.e. "Sally".
By contrast, "She was
lying on the beach," if it appeared by itself, has an exophoric expression;
"she" refers to something that the reader is not told about. That is
to say, there is not enough information in the text to independently determine
to whom "she" refers. It can refer to someone the speaker assumes his
audience has prior knowledge of or it can refer to a person he is showing to
his listeners. Without further information, in other words, there is no way of
knowing the exact meaning of an exophoric term.
Endophora can be broken into
three subcategories: cataphora, anaphora and self-reference.
a)
Cataphora
In linguistics, cataphora (from Greek,
forward carry) is used to describe an expression that co-refers
with a later expression in the discourse. That is to say, the earlier
expression refers to or describes a forward expression. Cataphora is a type of endophora
and it is the opposite of anaphora, a reference forward as opposed
to backward in the discourse.
Example:
"Finding the right gadget was a real hassle. I
finally settled with a digital camera." The "right gadget" is an
instance of cataphora because it refers to "a digital camera," an
object that hasn't been mentioned in the discourse prior to that point.
As a general rule, cataphoras are quite less common
than anaphoras in all natural languages; furthermore, cataphoras that are not
sentence-internal are typically very uncommon in informal, conversational
contexts.
The use of cataphora
v Using for rhetorical effect. It can build suspense and
provide a description.
For example: He's the biggest slob I know.
He's really stupid. He's so cruel. He's my boyfriend Nick.
v Using in subordinate clauses within a sentence. For
example:
·
If you want some, here's some parmesan cheese.
·
After he had received his orders, the soldier left the barracks.
v to provide a description in advance of a name. For
examples:
·
A little girl, Jessica, was playing on the swings.
b.
Anaphora Using
In linguistics,
anaphora is an instance of an
expression referring to another. In general, an anaphoric expression is
represented by a pro-form or some kind of deictic. In
some theories, the strict definition of anaphora includes only references to
preceding utterances. Under this definition, forward references are instead
named cataphora,
and both effects together are endophora. Also, the term exophora
names situations where the referent does not appear in the utterances of the
speaker, but instead in the real world. Some linguists prefer to define
anaphora generically to include all of these referential effects.
Example:
· The monkey took the banana and ate it. "It"
is anaphoric under the strict
definition (it
refers to the banana).
· The dog ate the bird and it died. "It" is
anaphoric, and ambiguous (did the dog
or bird die?).
c.
Self-reference
Self-reference occurs in natural
or formal languages when a sentence or formula
refers to itself. The reference may be expressed either directly—through some
intermediate sentence or formula—or by means of some encoding. In philosophy,
it also refers to the ability of a subject to speak of or refer to himself, herself,
or itself: to have the kind of thought expressed by the first person pronoun, the word
"I" in English. Self-reference is related to
self-reflexivity and apperception. A reflexive
sentence has the same subject and object (e.g., "The man washed
himself"). In contrast, a transitive
sentence requires both a direct subject and one or more objects (e.g.,
"The man hit John")
b)
Cohesion
Cohesion is the linguistic elements that make a
discourse semantically coherent. To go
back to our sample text ‘I have not met Dina’ should have the form ‘I haven’t’,
rather than ‘I have not met Dina’ is a matter of cohesion. So too is the use of
‘either’ in Dila hasn’t either’ and the use of pronoun ‘she’, rather than ‘Dina’
in the first clause of ‘She is never here when she should be’.
The destruction of cohesion:
a. The first
three text units are put in different order. Example:
·
‘Dila hasn’t either’.
·
‘I haven’t.
·
‘Have you met Dina?’
b. We replace
each of text-units with the corresponding complete text-sentence. Example:
·
‘Have you met Dina’
·
I haven’t met Dina.
·
Dila hasn’t met Dina either.
·
Dina is never here when she should be here’
It is clear that
the latter does not have the same kind of connectedness that the text: ‘Have
you met Dina? I haven’t. Dila hasn’t either. She is never here when she should
be here. For this reason it is difficult, even though not impossible, to make
the sequence as a text, rather than a string of disconnected utterance. Ellipse
and the use of pronouns and also the use of particular relating particles and
conjunctions (however, yet, etc) generally serve to make and maintain that kind
of connectedness to which the term ‘cohesion’ is used. Languages differ much with
respect to the grade to which they allow or oblige their users to relate
text-units are sequence by means of explicit indications of cohesion.
At last, it must be emphasized that the account about
speech acts in the preceding discussion is intended to cover in principle whole
aspect of production of text. Speech-act theorists have especially dealt with
the production of text-sentence without drawing the difference that has been
drawn between text sentences and system sentences. However, the utterance of a
sentence, in practice, always involves its contextualization- the process of
making the product of utterance both cohesive and coherent relation to its
context. As it was described previously that text and context are
complementary. What then is context? And how does it connect to utterance
meaning?
c.
Utterance-meaning and
context
The context of an idea or event is the
general situation that relates to it, and which helps it to be understood. Context decides utterance-meaning at three
distinguishable grades in the analysis of text discourse.
1. It will generally, if not always, make clear what
sentence has been stated- if a sentence has really been uttered.
2. It will generally make clear what proposition has been
stated- if proposition has been stated with one sort of illocutionary force
rather than another.
In all aspects,
context is relevant to the determination of what is said (lyons, 1995).
Nevertheless, utterance-meaning goes beyond what is
actually said: it also involved what is presupposed. In addition, context is
highly relevant to this part of the meaning of utterance. In this part, we
shall limit our attention to what is stated: to the locutionary and
illocutionary aspect of utterance meaning. Context may tell us what sentence
has been uttered is clear from our discussion of locutionary acts. As we saw,
tokens of the same utterance-type can result from the utterance, on different
occasions, of different sentences.
In this case, the utterance inscription itself will
generally be either grammatically or lexically ambiguous. However, it would
normally be obvious in a given context which of the two homonyms, ‘port 1’
(harbor) or ‘port2’ (kind of wine), is being used-and also which sense of the
polysemous verb ‘pass’ is wanted. Polysemy, is not like homonymy, does not give
us grounds for differentiating one sentence from another (on a traditional view
of sentence). However, it many none the less give to lexical ambiguity. In
collocation with ‘port 2’the most salient sense of ‘pass’, in most context, is
clearly the one in which it means ‘hand from one another’. Yet, it is easy to
see that in suitable context ‘pass’ means ‘go past’. As it was stated
previously discourse is composed in more than one utterance; to achieve
meaningful unit, the utterance must be related in some contextually appropriate
way or the text as a whole must show connectedness (lyons, 1995).
Furthermore, the taxonomy of types of explicit markers
of conjunctive relation is exemplified in the forms of additive, adversative,
casual, and temporal conjunction. Brown et all (1996: 191, 192, 193).
The description
above shows that discourse meaning includes both lexical and sentential
meaning. Therefore, the ambiguity that generally occurs in word and sentence
meaning also occur in discourse meaning. Since discourse is composed in more
than one sentence, to achieve meaningful unit, the utterance must be related in
some contextually appropriate way or text as a whole must show connectedness,
yet distinguishable properties of cohesion and coherence by applying
appropriate conjunctions, pronouns, and elliptical forms (lyons, 1995).
References
Ahmadin,
Dimjati.-. Levels of Meaning in Semantic Course. Uin Malang
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic
