SENTENCES AND THEIR CATEGORIES

The meaning of a sentence is not seen as a sum of the meaning of the words that make up the

sentence. A sentence meaning is a unit of meaning that is carried by the whole sentence. Based on their meanings, sentences can be classified into seven categories as follows:

1.      Analytic Sentence.

Analytic sentences are sentences that are necessarily true. They are true by definition, and are generally self-explanatory. It tells us about logic and about language use in which the meaning of the sentence is found to be true according to the facts.In additional, they often have little to no informative value. Examples of analytic sentences include:

o   Frozen water is ice.

o   Bachelors are unmarried men.

o   My mother is a female.

2.      Contradictory Sentence.

A contradictory sentence is any sentences that are necessarily false. It means that the meaning of the sentence is proved to be false according to the facts. For examples:

Ø  The river is bigger than the sea.

Ø  The boy is pregnant.

Ø  Water is heavier than iron.

3.      Anomalous Sentence.

An anomaly is a sentence that is either a contradiction or nonsense. Nonsense is a sentence that follows grammatical rules but it notates the semantic rules. It means that nonsense is grammatically true, but semantically wrong.Hurley (1996) gives a sentence widely used by linguistics to illustrate:

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously

Explanation:

The sentence obeys all the syntactic rules of English. The subject is colorless green ideas and the predicate is sleep furiously. It has the same syntactic structure as the sentence Dark green leaves rustle furiously. However, there is obviously something semantically wrong with the sentence. The meaning of colorless includes the semantic feature "without color", but it is combined with the adjective green, which has the semantic feature "green in color". How can something be both "without color" and "green in color"? This sentence violates what we know about semantic features and is, therefore, semantically anomalous.

4.      Synthetic Sentence

In contrast with analytic sentence, synthetic sentences are descriptions of the world that cannot be taken for granted. Sentences that are possibly true but not necessarily true are synthetic. They are based on our sensory data and experience. The truth-value of a synthetic statement cannot be figured out based solely on logic (Quine, 1953). It may be true or false depending on the way the world is.

If one had no sensory input from the world, then studying the statement would not yield the meaning of the sentence, as it would for an analytic sentence. Examples of synthetic sentences are:

o   Mary loves her daughter.

o   The table in the kitchen is round.

o   My computer is on.

5.      Un-interpretable Sentence.

An interpretable sentence is a sentence that sounds like an English sentence, but it makes no sense at all because it includes words that have no meaning or words that do not belong to English and may also happen to other languages. For instances:

“The smurf is mlirting the slock seefly in the klooth”

“My brother will peetch the clog.”

The words used in the two sentences above seem like English because the grammar is actually correct, but the content words in the sentence above are all senseless.

6.      Paraphrase.

Paraphrases are sentences having the same meaning or parts of the two sentences are synonymous. There are two kinds of paraphrases, lexical paraphrase and grammatical paraphrase.

7.      Ambiguous Sentence.

Ambiguous sentence has more than one meaning. There are two kinds of ambiguous sentence. They are:

Ø  Lexical ambiguity: The presence of two or more possible meanings within a single word. The ambiguous word can be a homonym, a polysemy, or a metaphor. For example, ‘Dr. Jack is a butcher’. Here butcher can mean profession or killer. Other examples added by Hurley (1996) are:

1.   Sherlock saw the man with the binoculars.

Sherlock used binoculars to see the man? Or did Sherlock see a man who was wearing binoculars?

2.      Tibetan history teacher.

A history teacher is from Tibet,or the teacher of Tibetan history.

3.      Shortmen and women.

Woman and men who are short, or men and women who are short.

Ø  Structural/ Grammatical Ambiguity

The structure of the grammar of the sentence can be interpreted in more than one way. For instance

REFERENCES

Hurley, Pat, K. (1996) . Week 12 Module 4 Lesson 4.3.4 Compositional Semantics.http://emedia.leeward.hawaii.edu/hurley/Ling102web/mod43_semantics/4mod4.3.4_compositional.htm

Quine, W.V. (1953). Analytic and Synthetic Statements.

http://www.rit.edu/cla/philosophy/quine/analytic_synthetic.html