| This grammar of English is concerned principally with the syntactic and semantic structures of sentences. In the two previous tables we named ten principal uses of the sentence: question, request, command, order, promise, advice, law, regulation, prescription, assertion. The just previous table suggested that in all these uses there are basically three types of syntactic structures: declarative, imperative, and interrogative. It is clear that sentences with the same syntactic structure may have different uses, different kinds of interpretations, different semantic structures. |
The phrastic of a sentence.R. M. Hare has suggested that there are three divisions for the various contents of any speech act: phrastic, tropic, and neustic (1970). He argues that when a logician analyzes the structure of a sentence, its semantic components should fall into one of these three categories. The phrastic is the logical proposition corresponding to the sentence’s content. In ¶3-3-3 there were examples of performative sentences, in which use the content of the declarative sentence cannot be interpreted as Boolean. The conclusion is that in general the interpretation of a sentence does not correspond to a proposition. In this grammar the phrastic is the logical analysis of the content of the sentence, whether Boolean (proposition), scalar (number with units), or qualitative (predicate), which interpretation depends on its use. |
The tropic of a sentence.Hare’s tropic corresponds to that part of the meaning conveyed by the syntactic mode of the sentence. The discussion of the last section should have made it clear that English does not indicate the uses of a sentence by a consistent and uniform signal of syntactic mode. This means that the use of a sentence and tropic of the sentence may be in opposition and their relationship known only to the author. |
The neustic of a sentence.The neustic is the part that expresses the speaker’s commitment to the truth of the utterance or one’s sincerity in uttering it. This semantic component is therefore scalar. Typically the expression of the neustic depends on the level of analysis. On one level the neustic of (1a) paraphrases as expressed in (1b). But on the next level of analysis there is another neustic expressible as in (1c). |
| (1) | a. | John will probably arrive at 6:00 p.m. | |
| b. | It is true that John will probably arrive at 6:00 p.m. | ||
| c. | It is probably true that John will arrive at 6:00 p.m. |
| I deal further with this feature of English grammar in ¶17-5-5. |
Semantics of conceptual dependency.The three main semantic components of Hare are still quite complex. The analyst needs concepts to serve as the primitive elements for defining the more involved meaning of utterances — formal features in terms of which to categorize sentence forms semantically. During the 1970’s the psychologist and artificial intelligence investigator Roger Schank and others developed what he called conceptual dependency (Schank 1972). His purpose was to symbolize the meaning behind human knowledge and activity. With his technique he paid little overt attention to syntactic structures. But his work was significant in that he showed how it is feasible to build a “system” for semantic description using symbols in an ad hoc fashion. Schank’s purpose in symbolization is to characterize semantic structures per se. In this grammar, however, the purpose in symbolization is as an aid in relating the syntactic structures of English to semantic structures in a systematic way. |
Some modern semantic networks.Growing directly out of conceptual dependency were other forms of semantic networks. In the ensuing years, one of the more successful models for characterizing the representation of knowledge using a network made semantic relations into the nodes, generalized the connectives, and pursued the preservation of strict logical properties. Through the considerable influence of Rudolf Carnap, this work developed what since about 1996 has become known as MultiNet (Helbig 2006). The chief distinguishing feature of MultiNet is its multilayered architecture. Its roots and formal structures are for me very appealing. The approach its strongly empirical with a commitment to logical foundations. I must say, however, that disenchantment has more than once raised it ugly head. There appears at times to be an almost wanton disregard for the syntactic facts of English (and German) leaving many discrepancies to be resolved by a separate Question-Answering component. |
Layering the semantic network.Following the Hare’s idea of a neustic, we will take the topmost layer of the semantic network as expressing the author’s attitude towards the truth of the proposition of the sentence. The figure illustrates how this may be diagrammed using a blue functor-arc between two situation nodes. The details will be given in the next section. The topmost level is that of the neustic, i.e., roughly the utterance. The next level is that of the phrastic, i.e., roughly the expression. In this figure the sentence itself, “This is my book,” is built on the situation node of the linguistic expression. This level comprises the intensional denotations of which natural language is capable. The third layer belongs to the realm of the logical and mathematical models. This bottom conceptual layer, the pre-extensional level, contains elements such as the variable, the constant, the individual, as such or as members of a set. The connection to this logical level may be put on the diagram using a red functor arc to represent the relationship of word designations to their extension in the real world. |
| Notice that I have given all the lexemes (in light yellow) reflexes on the pre-extensional level using red functor-arcs for the reference, extensionality and temporality functors. Each node has a set of yellow boxes associated with it listing distinctive features of their respective ontologies. Situations participate in the time dimension through tense. In our model present time gives the value of the specific point in time referred to equal to zero. Past time would be greater than zero and future less than zero. The syntactic-semantic relations in black are usually one of the 90 Multinet relations, but I have changed some names and added others. In MultiNet CLASS is called “Subordinate.” The arc labeled CLASS is interrupted with a situation node that thereby refers to the state comprising that particular relation. This is the semantic force of the predication in the sentence — that the book referred to deictically belongs to the class of my books. The dashed arc represents a grammatical or morphological process, in this case pronominalization. This process unifies meaning of the reference of this as a determiner with that of a noun (object). |
