Sentence meaning
Author: Billy Clark
© Dr Billy Clark
Abstract
Thoughts on the teaching of sentence meaning within a linguistics programme.
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Discussion
Sentence Meaning is an important component of a general account of linguistic meaning. Studying it raises important issues about finding relevant data, about the relationship between data and theories, about the use of intuitions as data. It also raises questions about the notion of compositionality, and about the interaction of separate components of linguistic knowledge and linguistic theory.
Sentence Meaning is a difficult subject which can be introduced gently, beginning with an overall sketch of what a theory of linguistic meaning needs to account for, namely how an initial, linguistically encoded semantic representation leads to an overall interpretation of an utterance in context. Linguistic semantics aims to account for what is linguistically encoded, while a pragmatic theory will explain how more detailed interpretations are derived on the basis of semantic representations.