Semantics I acknowledgements
Download 332.89 Kb. View original pdf
|
| 4.8 Co-reference Co-reference deals with the same of referent in a text. A text here is according to Halliday refers to : Any passage, spoken or written whatever length, the does form a unified (1980 : Text according to the definition above is a semantic units, not a grammatical units. Actually, what we have discussed in the preceding section was dealing with proposition of the semantic representation of sentences. But in this case, co-reference is apart of a text or the common term a discourse. SEMANTICS Page 71 Co-reference consists of : Anaphoric and Cataphoric. To make clear let’s look at the examples below Look at the sun, it is going down quickly. It is going down quickly, the sun. In the first example, it refers back to the sun, while in the second, it refers forward to the sun. thus in anaphoric, the referent is determined by what has been previously mentioned in a text. Whereas cataphoric – the referent is determined by what will be mentioned of the following (referring forward). The definite article the can also be found in anaphoric, wherein the preceding, indefinite article a/an has been mentioned. Leech made the example of this sort as They have made a film of his latest novel, but after reading the book, I found the film a great disappointment The referents of the book and the film are made clear by the fact that a film and a novel have already been mentioned earlier in the sentence. Thus the film and book co-refer to a film and his last novel. In the problem o co-reference is one that has same referents, how then to make justification of the following entailment? Daphne rode a stallion entails Daphne rode a horse. Can we guarantee that both Daphne refer to the same person On the other hand, if one of the Daphne above is the name of a cat or one is male (person) and another is female? SEMANTICS Page It is, of course, we cannot guarantee that one (Daphne) co-refers to another. It is in accordance with what Geoffrey leech explained that proper nouns do not appear to have contrastive meaning (do not have componential definitions, whereas common nouns like girl, book, etc, do. So, we may think or decide to give the name Daphne to a girl’s name, a car, a cat, or a mountain. Download 332.89 Kb. Share with your friends:
|