Putri Nora Br Purba : Figurative Expressions In Karonesesociety: Nure-Nure, 2009.
2.3 Goals of Semantic Theory
There are two questions of the goals of a semantic theory. What should a semantic theory do, and how should it do it?
The short answer to the first question is that a semantic theory should attribute to each expression in the language the semantic properties and relations it
has and it should define those properties and relations. Means that, in an expression e is meaningful, the semantic theory should say so. If the expression e has a specific
set meaning, the semantic theory should specify them. If the expression e is ambiguous, the semantic theory should record that fact, and so on. Moreover, if two
expressions are synonymous, or one entails the other, the semantic theory should mark these semantic relations.
The second questions concerning the goals of a semantic theory are, How should the theory handle all these semantic properties and relations? What kinds of
constraints on a semantic theory are reasonable to impose? First, it is generally conceded that even though a natural language contains an
infinite number of phrases and sentences, a semantic theory of natural language should be finite. People are capable of storing only a finite amount of information but
they nevertheless learn the semantics of natural language. The second constraint on a semantic theory of a natural language is that it
should reflect the fact that, expect for idioms, expressions are compositional. This means that the meaning of a syntactically complex expression is determined by the
meaning of its constituents and their grammatical relations. Compositionality rests on the fact that a finite number of familiar words and expressions can be combined and
recombined to form an infinite number of novel phrases and sentences; hence, a
Putri Nora Br Purba : Figurative Expressions In Karonesesociety: Nure-Nure, 2009.
finite semantic theory that reflects compositionality can describe meanings for an infinite number of complex expressions.
2.4 Figurative Expressions 2.4.1 Definition of Figurative Expression
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