ORDINARY EVALUATION

Summary Units 17-20

Student: Justo Mejia Marin.

 Unit 17 Meaning Postulates.

In this unit the book deals with the way a semantics dictionary works, the way the
semantic information is represented, it gives several examples of predicates, sense
relationships and sense properties. Having dealt with those concepts mentioned in
previous units, this unit tries to explain the concept of a “meaning postulate” which
is a formula expressing some aspect of the sense of a predicate. It can be read as a
proposition necessarily true by the meaning of the predicates involved. (R. Hurford)
To exemplify the “meaning postulates” some examples regarding synonyms,
antonyms and hyponyms are given, concluding that the predicates of a language
all fit into an enormously complicated network of interrelationships. (R. Hurford) A
predicate may be indirectly related through this network to thousands of other
predicates. To shorten such networks of thousands of predicates the unit also
explains such concepts like “selectional restrictions” “contradiction and “anomaly”

 Unit 18 Properties of predicates.

This unit puts into practice the following concepts: analytic sentence, contradiction
and entailment since Hurford believes its important to illustrate the sense
properties of predicates because they have to be thought as the meanings that can
be, metaphorically speaking, in the dictionary entries of the mind of a native
speaker within those entries of sense properties there are six properties of three
groups: symmetry, reflexivity and transitivity all of those properties in each group
are two-place predicates.

 Unit 19 Derivation.
Unit 19 comes up with a very interesting concept out of the premise that to
understand the meaning of a predicate it should necessarily exists in the dictionary
of a language, if it doesn’t, it simply cannot be taken apart into predicates,
properties, synonyms, hyponyms, meaning postulates, symmetry, reflectivity or
any other concept so far regarding semantics. Such concept called “Derivation”
must be understood as all the words that we most likely never heard or used before
but in one way or another can get to have clear meanings. People must be driven
by the necessity or simple amusement of creating new words derived from others
and they get to be stored in our mental semantic dictionaries. Derivation, however,
makes it clear that there exist certain quite clear, regular, rule-governed processes
by which new words are born from old ones. These processes are often called
processes of derivation and the rules that describe them may be referred to as
derivational rules, word formation rules, or morphological rules. Therefore,
Derivation can be defined as the process of forming new words according to a
regular pattern based on pre-existing words.

When the processes of derivation are analysed in a deeper way we get to know more
concepts such as: morphological, syntactic and semantic steps to create a new
word, suffixes and prefixes and labels that identify the different types of derivation.
Those labels are called inchoative, causative and resultative. Those notions
inchoative, causative, and resultative denote states, through words denoting
processes, through words denoting actions, and back to words denoting states.
ORDINARY EVALUATION
Summary Units 17-20
Student: Justo Mejia Marin.
Even though the usefulness of a derivational process for a new word is doubtful or
even unnecessary, it can only be productive if it can be used to produce an existing
derived word from every appropriate source word.

 Unit 20 Participant Roles.

Unit 20 keeps going forward and putting into practice “meaning postulates” and
“derivation” but now clarifying the different ways in which things and people
participate in some of the real-world situations described by sentences. In a given,
particular sentence we can find: an agent, an affected and an instrument object.

The AGENT carries out the action described. The AFFECTED participant is the
thing or person with which the action is carried out also called “The Patient” and
The INSTRUMENT is the thing (hardly ever a person) by means of which the action
is carried out. These participant roles can be applied in a semantic formula to see
where and in how many cases the predicates happened to be the same as well as
the sense relationships and sense properties, it can also be applied in a grammar
formula to see where they belong as speech parts: subjects, objects or
complements. There is some systematic relationship between the semantic roles
and the grammatical positions, but it is evidently a complicated relationship. To
make those relationships clearer the aid of these two notions comes in handy
“Location” and “Beneficiary”
“Location” is any expression referring to the place where the action described by a
sentence takes place. “Beneficiary” is the person for whose benefit or detriment the
action described by the sentence is carried out. With these two new roles, we again
see the versatility of Subject position and Complement position. Both roles are
found correlated with both grammatical positions. Hurford concludes the unit by
saying that disagreements have raised on how many participants (in a semantic
sense) can exist or the functions they serve on a sentence as well as their definitions
which might remain unclear from one semantic analysis to another. He mentions
some of those “other” participants in a sentence “the experiencer” and “the theme”
The experiencer is basically just the witness of the action described in a sentence
because he is not in control of such situation while, the theme is what the
experiencer sees or perceives.
References:

James R. Hurford, Brendan Heasley, and Michael B. Smith 2007 “A COURSE

BOOK ON SEMATICS” 2ND EDITION. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid,
Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo.