Meaning And Sentence, Utterance, And Proposition

A sentence is a string of words put together by the grammatical of rules of a language expressing a complete thought. It is neither physical event nor a physical object. For example, I am a student.

An Utterance is any sound of talk, that human produce. The characteristics of utterance are:
•It is spoken
•Physical event
•May be grammatical or not (REMEMBER, utterances do not focus on the grammatical
aspect)
•Meaningful or meaningless
•By specific person (in particular accent)
•By specific time or on particular occasion
•A piece of language (a single phrase or even a single word)

To differentiate utterance and sentence, we usually use quotation mark (“….“) in written form of utterance. For example, a piece of utterance that is spoken by certain person “I’m a student”.

A Proposition is that part of the meaning of the utterance of a declarative sentence which describes some state of affairs. Besides declarative sentence, proposition also clearly involved in the meaning of interrogatives and imperative sentences. For example, “Get out of here this minute!”, “I’m afraid that I’ll have to ask you to leave.” In these two sentences, the speaker asserted proposition.

We can entertain preposition in the mind regardless whether they are true or false,
by thinking them or believing them, but only true proposition can be known.

 The relationship between reference and utterance is not as direct as that sense and proposition, but there is a similarity. Both, referring and uttering are acts performed by particular person on particular occasion. Most utterances contain one or more acts of referring. An act of referring is the picking out of a particular referent by a speaker in the course of particular utterance .

While now we discuss about the meaning, there are two kinds of meaning, they are; Literal and Non-Literal meaning. Literal meaning is usually used to express the common expression which does not interpretation, for example one afternoon we are feeling the effects of missing lunch, you might speak literally ‘ I’m Hungry’. While non-Literal uses of languages are traditionall called Figurative and are described by a host rhetorical terms including metaphor, irony, metonomy, synecdoche, and litotes, as like in these sentence ; I’m starving, I could not eat a horse, My stomach thinks my throat’s cut.

Reference:

  http://fitrymayanti.blogspot.com/2009/12/sentences-utterances-and-proposition.html