COMPONENTS AND THE SENTENCES

Oleh Miftahul Chaer (20401107107)
Components may be used to stated selection restrictions. All that is needed is that a particular component should be stated as a feature of one of the collocated words and as part of the required environment of the other.

Katz and Fodor (1963), however, suggest that we can go further and actually derive the meaning of the words it contains. It is worthwhile looking in detail at their model if only to illustrate how difficult it is to move form word to sentence meaning, and because no one else has made such as a clear and detailed proposal. In simple language, what they propose is a set of rules to combine the meanings of individual lexical items. The rules are called Projection Rules, the combination is referred to as Amalgamation, and the meanings are called Paths. Projection rules are needed since it is necessary to state what may be amalgamated with that, and in what order. This will be determined by the grammatical status of the elements.

The example chosen by Kats and Fodor as an illustration of the application of the projection rules is the man hit the colorful ball. The first establish is the grammatical status of the lexical items, that colorful is an adjective and ball a noun and that together whit the they form a noun phrase, and so on, but we need not bother with the details here. We then have to amalgamate the paths of the various lexical items. In on path colorful we find a marker (color) referring to actual color, but there is another path in which the marker is to deal with the meaning of colorful to refer the colorful nature of any aesthetic object. Ball has three paths, one with the marker (social activity), the other two with the marker (physical object) but distinguished by the distinguisher [having globular shape] and [solid missile for projection by engine of war].in general terms we are saying that all three balls can be colorful in the literal sense of having color, but only the ball at which people dance can be colorful in the evaluative sense-the other two balls cannot.

We now amalgamate colorful ball with hit. Hit has two paths, one indicating collision, the other indicating striking, and both occur in the environment (physical objects). We shall not, however, now have eight two times four) derived paths, since neither will amalgamate with colorful ball with the marker (social activity), since in neither of hit can this kind of ball be hit. We shall instead have only four possibilities. Finally, we can amalgamate the path of the man (one path only), and so eventually derive four readings only for the sentence (colliding with or striking either an ordinary ball or a cannon ball).