Thematic Relation, the Truth of Sentence

A. Thematic Relation

The cats are flying.

Is false.

Verbs are subcategorized for zero, one, or two object,

and that these objects have a logical relation to the verb.

The semantic relationships that we have called theme, agent, and

Analytic Sentences
Something that true refers to the definition. For example, a

location are among the thematic relations or -roles of the verb.

bachelor is unmarried man; mother is a married woman who

Other thematic relations are goal, (where the action is directed),

has children. We might say that analytic sentence is true by

source (where the action originated), and instrument (an object

definition. Analytic sentences are sometimes referred to as

used to accomplish the action).

linguistic truths, because they are true by the virtue of the

e.g. The boy carried the red brick from the wall to the wagon.
Agent

Theme

Source

language itself.

Goal

The boy broke a window with the red brick.

Agent

Theme

Instrument

Synthetic sentences
Sentences that may be true or false depending upon how the
world is are called synthetic. For example, the sentence The
paint of Wayans house is green is a synthetic sentence. We

B. The truth of sentence

Part of the meaning of a sentence is certainly knowledge
of its truth conditions. Those truth conditions would contain
much of the information about meaning discussed in the previous
section. In the world as we know it, the sentence
The birds are flying.

Is true, and the sentence

can not judge its truth or falsity by inspecting the words in

the sentence. Rather, we must verify the truth or falsity of
this sentence empirically, for example, by checking the
Wayans house. The example that we have considered so
far seem fairly straight forward. Analytic and contradictory
sentence are true and false respectively, by definition.

d. The king of France might be bald/ possibly the king of

Entailment

One sentence entails another. A sentence (meaning) A entails B if

whenever A is true, then B must also be true.

France is bald.
e. If the king of France is bald, he should wear a hat in the
winter

For examples:
1.

Mary broke the window - The window broke.

2.

Sue and Fred went to the party - Sue went to the

References:

party.

Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things With Words.

Cambridge. Harvard University press.

Figure 1. Representation of entailment

Sentence (a)

Brown Gillian & George Yule. 1983. Discourse

Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

ENTAILS
T

https://www.msu.edu/course/lin/437/entpresu.htm,
October 17th, 2010
Mariani, Nanik & Muin, Fatchul. 2007. An introduction
to Linguistics (Teaching and Learning Material). PBS

Sentence (b)

Presupposition

One sentence presupposes another if the falsity of the second

renders the first without a truth value. A sentence without a true
value is one that cannot be judged true or false.
For example: A speaker of any of the sentence below would
be presupposing that there is a king of France.
a.

The king of France is bald.

b. The king of France is not bald.

c. Is the king of France bald?

FKIP Universitas Lambung Mangkurat.