UNIVERSE OF DISCOURSE

The universe of discourse for any utterance is the particular situation or world, real or imaginary that the participant of the discourse assumes he/she is talking about at the time. Ex: - Indonesia is suffering from various kinds of crisis > real - Gatotkaca was flying in the sky > unreal No universe of discourse is a totally fictitious world. It can be totally real, or it is a world which is a combination between real and unreal worlds. Ex: - Our country (real) & various kinds of crisis (real) - Hanoman (unreal) & mountains (real) Two people might be working within partially or completely different universes of discourse. But having the same universe of discourse is essential to achieve a successful communication.

Referring Expression is any expression used in an utterance to refer to something or someone. In `Herman phoned me` the name Herman is referring expression in this utterance. But in There's no one called Herman in our class Herman is not referring expression. The same expression can be a referring expression or not depending on the context. Whether an expression is a referring expression is heavily dependent on linguistic contexts and on the circumstances of utterance. Normally, different expressions referring to the same thing/person have the same meaning, but it is not always the case. Ex: The morning star and the evening star refer to the same planet, Venus. 1. Opaque context is a part of a sentence which could be made into a complete sentence by the addition of a referring expression, but will yield sentences with different meanings when uttered in a given situation. Ex: George believes that. (He) Is a genius. Typically opaque contexts involve a certain kind of verbs like want, believe, think, and wonder about. 2. Equative Sentence is one which is used to declare that two referring expressions found in the sentence have the same referent. Ex: Bill Clinton is the president off the U.S.A. 3. equative sentences is that the order of the two referring expressions can be reversed without loss of acceptability. Ex: The president of the U.S.A is Bill Clinton.

4. Reversal test is not a perfect diagnostic test for determining equative sentences. In a certain case it does not work. Ex: What we need is a democratic government > a democratic government is not a referring expression, because a user of this sentence would not have any particular democratic government in mind, but the sentence is reversible. While the sentence That is the man who kidnapped the activist is equative, but it is not reversible. Predicate is any word (sequence of words) which can function as the predicator of a sentence. Ex: - Predicate : hungry, in, crook, asleep, hit, show. - Non Predicate and, or, but, not. Certain words can be ambigous, they can have more than one sense. Ex: The word man has three senses: (a) human being, (b) male adult human being, (c) transitive verb. A simple sentence only has one predicator, although it may contain more than one instance of a predicate. Ex: His new company has many young bright potential employees Predicator > has predicates > new, company, many, young, bright, potential, employee.

 We can also talk of predicate, in the case of preposition, nouns, and adjectives. Ex: - The lamp is over the table (over is a two-place predicate). - she is intelligent (intelligent is a one-place predicate). - john is a corporal (corporal is a one-place predicate). Predicator: sentences contain one or more referring expressions and some other words that do not from any part of referring expressions. Ex: Marcus Brutus killed Julius Caesar. The predicators in sentences can be of various parts of speech (adjectives, verbs, prepositions, and noun). Words of other parts of speech (conjunctions, articles, qualifiers) cannot serve as predicators in sentences. Ex: Achmad is Malaysian Achmad > argument Malaysian > Predicator The role of predicator (played by predicate) and the role of argument (Played by the referring expressions).