Showing papers on "Utterance published in 1975"

The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse

Abstract: BELIEVE THAT speaking or writing in a language consists in performing speech acts of a quite specific kind called "illocutionary acts." These include making statements, asking questions, giving orders, making promises, apologizing, thanking, and so on. I also believe that there is a systematic set of relationships between the meanings of the words and sentences we utter and the illocutionary acts we perform in the utterance of those words and sentences.' Now for anybody who holds such a view the existence of fictional discourse poses a difficult problem. We might put the problem in the form of a paradox: how can it be both the case that words and other elements in a fictional story have their ordinary meanings and yet the rules that attach to those words and other elements and determine their meanings are not complied with: how can it be the case in "Little Red Riding Hood" both that "red" means red and yet that the rules correlating "red" with red are not in force? This is only a preliminary formulation of our question and we shall have to attack the question more vigorously before we can even get a careful formulation of it. Before doing that, however, it is necessary to make a few elementary distinctions.

Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre

Abstract: THE REACTION AGAINST genre theory in recent times is a strategic feature of what must be called the ideology of modernism. And it is certain that of all literary works, so-called modernistic ones are the least classifiable according to traditional "kinds": witness the rise of a new and hybrid form in the novel, and in our own day, the emphasis on the incomparable uniqueness of the style and "world" of the individual writer. Yet the waning of the modern and the return to plot suggest that a reexamination of the question of genre may be in order. Genres are essentially contracts between a writer and his readers; or rather, to use the term which Claudio Guillen has so usefully revived, they are literary institutions, which like the other institutions of social life are based on tacit agreements or contracts. The thinking behind such a view of genres is based on the presupposition that all speech needs to be marked with certain indications and signals as to how it is properly to be used. In everyday life, of course, these signals are furnished by the context of the utterance and by the physical presence of the speaker, with his gesturality and intonations. When speech is lifted out of this concrete situation, such signals must be replaced by other types of directions, if the text in question is not to be abandoned to a drifting multiplicity of uses (or meanings, as the latter used to be termed). It is of course the generic convention which is called upon to perform this task, and to provide a built-in substitute for those older corrections and adjustments which are possible only in the immediacy of the face-to-face situation. Yet it is clear at the same time that the farther a given text is removed from a performing situation (that of village storyteller, or bard, or player), the more difficult will it be to enforce a given generic prescription on a reader; indeed, no small part of the art of writing is absorbed by this (impossible)

Hermeneutics and the Role of History

Abstract: AS A NUMBER of the contributions to this issue1 of New Literary History serve to illustrate, the general retreat from empiricism and positivism in recent analytical philosophy has had a markedly beneficial effect on current discussions about the theory of interpretation. Two aspects of this trend have proved to be of particular relevance. One has been the attack on empiricist epistemology, with the consequent rejection of the belief in sense data which are capable of being directly perceived and embodied in a noninterpretative observation language. It is coming to be widely accepted that Quine, Kuhn, and Feyerabend, in their different but converging ways, have all succeeded in undermining any attempt to build up a structure of empirical knowledge on a basis purporting to be independent of our judgments.2 The next move which a number of analytical philosophers have thus been prompted to make is to appeal directly to the tradition of hermeneutics, as revived by Gadamer, Ricoeur, and especially Habermas, and to argue for a more interpretative model of the natural, as well as the human, sciences.3 The other influential development has been the abandonment, in the theory of meaning, of any positivist disposition to assert that meaningful statements must refer to facts, and thus that the meaning of a sentence must be given by its method of verification. The main challenge to this key concept of logical positivism was of course issued by Wittgenstein in the Investigations, with his famous injunction not to ask directly about the meaning of propositions but rather about how they are used in particular language games. More recently, the underlying assumption of this approach-that the analysis of meaning needs to be connected with the use of language for purposes of communication-has been refined and extended in two connected ways. First, J. L. Austin and his followers, in developing the theory of speech acts, have concentrated on the idea that, as a given utterance has a meaning, a given agent will characteristically be doing something-and may thus be said to mean something-in or by the act of issuing that particular utterance.4 Secondly, H. P. Grice, followed by a number of theoretical linguists as well as philosophers of language, has gone on to offer an analysis of the concept of meaning which is at issue when we speak of someone meaning something in or by saying something.5

Language Acquisition in the Bilingual Child.

Abstract: The study of language acquisition in children has become increasingly important in recent years. From the normative studies of the 1930s (McCarthy, 1954), we have age related milestones for the language development of children. From the more recent psycholinguistic research based on transforma tional grammar (Brown and Bellugi, 1964; Chomsky, 1957; 1965; Meny?k, 1969) we know further that a child's language is not acquired through a simple associational learning process but rather with the grasp of a complex set of rules underlying the structure of language. The psycholinguistic research is beginning to demonstrate that there are definite relationships between linguistic and cognitive universals (Slobin, 1971). That is, when describing child language, researchers suggest thet there are relationships between psychological and linguistic processes that occur from the inception of an idea to its actual phonological manifestation and from the time the child begins to utter his first word until he becomes an adult user of the language. The best indication of these universals is that children all over the world learn language according to a set of underlying principles that appear to be the same. There appears to be a series of processes that all children progress through in acquiring language. The first stage in language acquisiton is that of one word speech. This stage occurs somewhere between 8 and 17 months. One word speech is described as holophrastic or "rich in meaning" (McNeill, 1966). That is, a single word may mean a complex set of ideas. Speech at this stage is also predicative in that the child generally lacks verbs. However, he seems to be saying something about the world. For instance, if the child says "milk," he may mean "I want milk," or "there is a glass of milk sitting on the table," or "give me a glass of milk." Along with this, at the one word stage, it is important to note that any description of a child's language at this point must be based upon how the observer interprets the situation and the utter ances. The child at this stage cannot use his speech to elaborate or to get his meaning across at all times. Thus as Bloom (1970) has pointed out, it is important to include the context of the utterance in an attempt to make the meaning of that utterance clearer. Brown (1973) described child language in terms of five stages through which a child progresses. He uses a range of the Mean Length of Utteran ce which increases with age to characterize each stage. Thus instead of dividing each stage up in terms of the number of words per stage, Mean Length of

Generation as a social action

Abstract: In the example above, the child's question is understandable in terms of his wants and fears and beliefs about the world. In order to explain why he asked the question he did, we must view his utterance as an action, rather than Just a string of words. A string of words, per se, is not associated with any plan or goal. But an action is; in fact, the full representation of an action seems to require a representation of both its actual and its intended effects, its actual and its assumed preconditions.

The use of syntax in a speech understanding system

Abstract: When a person hears an English sentence, he uses many sources of information to assign structure and meaning to the utterance. One of these sources, syntax, is concerned with the goal of producing a consistent, meaningful, grammatical structure for the sentence. The exact type of structure produced is not as crucial as the process of building that structure because the speech environment has inherent problems which make the parsing of speech a much more complex task than the parsing of text. For example, lexical ambiguity, caused by variations in articulation and imperfect or imprecise phoneme recognition, would lead to a combinatorial explosion in conventional parsers. This paper describes the design of the Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) speech parser with emphasis on the reasons for using the formalism of transition network grammars and on the interaction of the syntactic component with other parts of the system. A detailed example is given to illustrate the operation of the parser.

The SRI speech understanding system

Abstract: This paper describes the structure of the second version of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) speech understanding system and presents the data gathered on its performance. The system is distinctive in the way that knowledge from various sources is coordinated by a "best-first" parser to predict the sequence of words in an utterance, and in the use of word functions-programs that represent the acoustic characteristics of a word-to test the predictions.

On the Nature of Talk to Children

Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter reviews preliminary findings in regard to differences in syntax, semantics, style, and manner of utterances directed to children as opposed to adults. The language-learning child's input is different from the input in verbal communication between adults. Talk to children is not a one-way process. Adult remarks are often in response to what the child has said. Adult responses might indicate to the child whether he has communicated grammatically or appropriately. Another characteristic of adult response to children is to repeat the child's utterance, filling in what has been left out by the child. Such responses have been called expansions. They are a sort of paraphrase offered to the child as an affirmation or comprehension check. Expansions are frequent in the early stages of development, becoming less frequent as more mature communication becomes possible. Expansions offer a child an adult paraphrase of an utterance he has just produced.

Formal semantics of Natural Language: Pragmatics in natural logic

Abstract: \U l' Pragmatics in natural logic sconce LAKOFF I would like to discuss two aspects of pragmatics that in recent years have been treated very differently: indexicals and conversational implicatures Montague and Scott proposed to handle indexicals by adding to points of reference (sometimes called ‘indices') extra coordinates for speaker, hearer, time and place of utterance This proposal places indexicals among those phenomena to be dealt with by formal logic, and such systems have in recent years been articulated by Lewis and Kamp, among others Implica- tures on the other hand, were taken by Grice to be by nature informal inferences of a fundamentally different kind than logical inferences, and hence not to be dealt with by the apparatus of formal logic In other papers I have dropped hints to the efl°ect that indexicals and implicatures should be treated somewhat differently than they are in the Montague-Scott and Grice proposals I would like to elaborate a bit on those hints The basic suggestion is this: (I) If the goals of what I have called natural logic are adopted, then it should in time be possible to handle indexicals without any extra coordinates for speaker, hcarer, and time and place of utterance, and it should also be possible to handle implicatures without any kinds of cxtralogical inference The basic ingredients of the suggestion are as follows: (A) The so-called performative analysis for imperatives, questions, statements, promises, etc (B) The limitation of points of reference to assignment coordinates for variables and atomic predicates (C) The commitment of natural logic to the formal semantic charac- terization of all natural language concepts, including those having 1 Copyright © by George Lakofi, 1973 All rights reserved by the author This work was partially supported by grants GS 35119 and GS 38476 from the National Science Foundation to the University of California An earlier version of this paper was presented at the University of Texas Conference on Performntives, Implications, and Presupposi- tions 353

The Language Teacher and the Rules of Speaking

Abstract: Knowledge of a second language should include more than just grammatical competence. Communication can only be effective when the student is also sensitive to the social and cultural aspects of language use and how these differ between his first and second language. Expectations and interpretations are likely to differ on the role of silence, speaking volume and intonation, situations requiring set formulas, conventions of politeness, and how information is organized and shared. This knowledge, which is seldom explicitly verbalized, constitutes the "rules of speaking." It is important for the language teacher to become aware of these cultural differences in language use, to recognize which points are likely to prove difficult for a particular student, and to guide the student accordingly. The ways people use language to communicate can differ radically from society to society. A knowledge of some of these cultural differences in the use of language will enable the language teacher to help his students avoid many potential misunderstandings. The student is quite conscious of certain kinds of problems in learning a second language: new sounds, new vocabulary, and new grammatical patterns. But even if the student can pronounce his second language correctly and put words together in the proper order, he still has to use the language like a native. He must know when to talk and when to keep silent, how loud to talk and with what intonation, what constitutes a polite request and what a refusal, how to initiate a conversation and how to end one, when to interpret an utterance literally and when to take it as a formulaic convention, and so on. Knowledge of this sort constitutes what the sociolinguist calls "the rules of speaking." Our knowledge of the rules of speaking is only partly conscious even in our native language. We learned some of these rules explicitly as children when our parents told us to say "please" when we ask for something or not to interrupt when adults are speaking. But most of the rules of speaking

Audience Address in Greek Tragedy

Abstract: All drama is meant to be heard by an audience, so that there is a sense in which any utterance in a play may be called audience address. It is possible, however, to draw a distinction between on the one hand the kind of drama in which the presence of an audience is acknowledged by the actors—either explicitly by direct address or reference to the audience, or implicitly by reference to the theatrical nature of the action the actors are undertaking, or by a combination of some or all of these elements—and on the other hand the kind of drama in which such a presence is not acknowledged, where the actors maintain the pretence that they are enacting a real as distinct from a theatrical event.

The role of semantics in automatic speech understanding

Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the role of semantic in automatic speech understanding. Psychologists have demonstrated that it is necessary for people to be able to draw on higher-level linguistic and world knowledge in their understanding of speech; the acoustic signal they hear is so imprecise and ambiguous that even knowledge of the vocabulary is insufficient to insure correct understanding. The chapter discusses some aspects of semantic knowledge and how they seem to contribute to understanding speech by a computer. Semantic knowledge is used in several ways to aid the general speech understanding task, as illustrated in SPEECHLIS: (1) it makes predictions local to a single utterance; (2) it collects sets of word matches that substantiate its hypotheses about the meaning of the utterance; and (3) it checks the possible syntactic organizations of the word matches to confirm or discredit those hypotheses. These are done currently in SPEECHLIS using both a semantic network representing the concepts known in the domain and the words and multiword names available for expressing them, and also case frames that give further information about their surface and syntactic realization.

Control concepts in a speech understanding system

Abstract: Automatic speech understanding must accommodate the fact that an entirely accurate and precise acoustic transcription of speech is unattainable. By applying knowledge about the phonology, syntax, and semantics of a language and the constraints imposed by a task domain, much of the ambiguity in an attainable transcription can be resolved. This paper deals with how to control the application of such knowledge. A control framework is presented in which hypotheses about the meaning of an utterance are automatically formed and evaluated to arrive at an acceptable interpretation of the utterance. This design is currently undergoing computer implementation as a part of the Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) Speech Understanding System (SPEECHLIS).

Semantic support for a speech understanding system

Abstract: One function of the Semantics component of SPEECH-LIS, the Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) Speech Understanding System, is to gather evidence for hypotheses it has made regarding the content of an utterance, as well as to evaluate the hypotheses made by other components. Another is to produce a representation of the utterance's meaning. Specifically, this involves forming consistent, meaningful collections of words which match regions of the speech waveform, and evaluating and interpreting the possible syntactic structures built of them. This paper discusses the data structures and organization of SPEECHLIS semantics and how they are directed to the above two tasks.

Early Semantic Development in Child Language

Abstract: The development of the structural properties of children's utterances in the second year of life is described by means of a model that assumes that the meaning of a sentence is basically a configuration of recursively occurring semantic predicates. Within the overall configuration the following subconfigurations should be distinguished: a performative and a nucleus (necessary elements); adverbials; noun modifiers, and embedded sentences (optional elements). The semantic representation of children's utterances up to about one and a half years of age contains both (and only) the necessary elements, even if limitation in utterance length allows only some of the semantic material to be realized into sounds. The optional elements all make their appearance between 1½ and 2 years. Around two, the ability to express an explicit sentence as part of another such sentence is acquired. This ability relates to the growth of the mechanism that maps meanings onto sounds, more specifically the submechanism that brings the structural properties of the semantic representation to the surface (syntax). The other submechanism is the lexicon, which maps the content properties of this representation onto sounds. Since the content properties are part of the general cognitive capacity of the child, whereas the structural properties could be specific to language, this could explain some differences in the development of lexicon and syntax.

Space, Time, and Philosophical Style

Abstract: It is a continuing irony that in an age of philosophical self-consciousness philosophers have been largely indifferent to questions about their own means of expression. It is as though they had tacitly established a distinction between form and matter, and had also asserted an order of priority between them: the "matter" was what they would deal with-the form of its expression being an accidental feature of the acts of conception and communication. To be sure, there is a method, or at least a dogma, behind this inclination. If one assumed that philosophical discourse cloaks the outline of a natural propositional logic, then the mode of discourse would indeed be arbitrarily related to its substance; at most, the medium of discourse would reflect an aesthetic decision-where "aesthetic" is meant to suggest a matter of taste, and "taste" in turn, a noncognitive ground. However one first put the utterance, it could be translated into a proposition of standard form which was either true or false.

Grammatical Development—The First Steps

Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the first stages of the child's acquisition of the grammar of his language. It describes several characteristics of his early utterances. The chapter discusses some recent theories regarding the nature of the grammatical rules internalized by the child. It discusses various views concerning the mechanisms responsible for the learning of these rules. In the first stages of his linguistic development, each of the child's utterances consists of one word. At about 18 months, he begins to string together two, and occasionally more, words. At first, the intonation pattern of these utterances often differs from that of short adult sentences: The child pauses after each word, the child stresses each of the words equally, and the typical terminal intonation is lacking. Presumably, one word is no longer enough to get the child's meaning across and he, therefore, adds words to make himself understood. The sequence of words is probably determined by momentary factors with the word that happens to be most salient for the child appearing first in the utterance.

Understanding Speech Understanding

Abstract: The perception of segments of speech one or two phonemes long is now quite well understood. This is because listeners rather readily accept the sort of experimental situation where they are asked simply to identify brief utterances, not always meaningful words in their language. A variety of powerful paradigms using variants of simple identification (for example reaction times and dichotic presentation) have been developed to specify factors involved in identifying these short segments of speech. Those not trained in the intellectual tradition of analytical experimental science are easily dissatisfied with the formal as opposed to superficial relevance that these tasks have to the perception of speech in real life situations, and those of us who have been studying perception at the phonemic level for many years have a kind of obligation not to rebuff their demands that we should be concerned with chunks of material of size that could actually constitute an utterance in a communication situation. Hence the title of this symposium “Dynamic Aspects of Speech Perception” is deliberately vague to avoid the implication that we are exclusively concerned with prosody, syntax, pragmatics or whatever. We are concerned with continuous speech perception.

Scientific and Religious Metaphors

Abstract: For quite some time, critics have attacked religious language on the grounds that theologians employed metaphors that were irreducible.1 By irreducible, they meant metaphors that could not be paraphrased in literal language. And any such language that could not be reduced to words that can be taken in a literal sense, would be devoid of cognitive meaning or truth value. Since theologians claimed that statements like 'God is love' cannot be reduced to a literal sense without robbing the concept of God of its trans cendent status, sceptics replied that such failures merely indicated the meaninglessness of religious language. Or, if apologists did assert that 'God is love' can be paraphrased by statements describing the love of one man for another, the sceptic claimed that such a move reduced religious language to anthropological language where terms like 'God' were superfluous. Critics argued that metaphors of religion posed the following dilemma: either religious metaphors could not be reduced to literal paraphrases and were, therefore, meaningless; or, religious metaphors could be reduced to literal paraphrases, but the method by which they were reduced eliminated the necessity for theological terminology. Like most dilemmas, a solution can be found by rejecting one of the horns, in this case, the first one. The assertion that metaphors which cannot be reduced to a literal statement are meaningless is based upon the assumption that metaphors used in everyday language and in science can be reduced, and it is this reduction that justifies these metaphors as meaningful. And there certainly are numerous metaphors that appear in ordinary discourse, and, while they are new and startling when first used, they become common place after a time. When someone first said, 'he was struck by her likeness to Jane', the audience probably was surprised by the use of 'struck' for the literal meaning of this word once was 'to hit' or 'touch with force'. Although at the beginning a misuse, gradually through continued utterance, the word 'struck' came to mean 'affect emotionally' as well as 'to hit'. When we are no longer startled, 'to be struck by a resemblance' has become a dead metaphor and may be considered to be part of ordinary discourse. Since science is considered to be composed of meaningful language, the pre sumption is often made that its metaphors are similarly reducible to ordinary

Pragmatics in speech understanding

Abstract: When a person speaks he is using words to achieve a goal, whether that be to gain information, to threaten, to promise, or to reassure. Recognition of that goal is an essential part of speech understanding, both in determining what was said and in deciding what was meant. The term "pragmatics" is used here to mean the procedure which applies knowledge about the speaker, the previous dialogue, and the domain of discourse to interpret utterances and respond appropriately. This procedure invokes definitions of intents (speech acts) and modes of interaction to recognize the goal of a speaker and consequently to understand his utterance.

Communication in the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer

Abstract: Schopenhauer has been neglected on the subject of communication. Yet his instructive consideration of it is comprehensive and modern. This essay, the product of studying all his works, sets forth his consideration, which consisted of defining communication and treating (1) the transmission of thought in its entirety, from its noetic origin to its adaptation for audiences, (2) the complication of motivation and the unlikely efficacy of persuasion, (3) the arts as the signification and transmission of Platonic Ideas, (4), the philosopher's mission as effective utterance, and (5) the limits of discourse.

Identification of vowels excerpted from context

Abstract: Subjects have been shown to have some difficulty in identifying vowels presented in isolation [Fairbanks and Grubb, J. Speech Hearing Res. 4, 203–219 (1961); Strange et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 55, S53(A) (1974); Moore and Mundie, AMRL‐TR‐70‐109 (Aug. 71)]. In all these studies, the speakers have produced the vowels in question with considerable precision. However, equivalent precision of utterance can not be assumed in more ordinary speech situations. In the present study, the effect of context on the identifiability of vowels was investigated. Six speakers produced ten monophthongal English vowels in two different phonetic contexts, h—d and nasal—nasal. The vowels were then excerpted from context and presented to subjects for identification. Subjects found the identification of these excerpted vowels to be quite difficult. The phonetic context, the abilities of the various speakers to produce vowels that could be readily identified as the intended vowel, and the vowels themselves, were all found to be s...

Competence‐Based Certification of Foreign Language Teachers: The Bellevue‐ Western Experience

Abstract: ting response. She reappropriates the child's erroneous utterance, paraphrases it, and elaborates upon it. This kind of sophisticated correction is found in second language learning situations but seldom. The reason for it may be that in a typical classroom there is no real parent, no real Dad and no real Mother, no real office and no real dinner, so paraphrase can hardly function at all. In order for the child to make the connection between his error and the

Meaning by means of meaning? by no means!

Abstract: Analyses of what it is for an utterance-type to have meaning in a language may, as those of Grice1, Lewis2, Schiffer3, and Bennett4, try to start from what it is for a speaker to mean something by an utterance. If they analyse this latter concept completely in terms of the speaker's intentions as the authors cited do they arrive at something like a gap between 'meaning for a speaker' and 'meaning in a language'. Grice tries to jump this gap by appealing to the concept of currency; meaning in a language is, in effect, what speakers usually mean. As not only Bennett has clearly pointed out5, anyone attempting such a leap will fail to reach the other side since, broadly speaking, the concept of meaning in a language is tied up with standards for correct usage, which cannot be defined by simply referring to current usage. Leaving aside the question of the validity of this argu? ment, we may note that it provides a strong motive to appeal to a further authority, viz. convention, and to regard meaning as determined by some? thing like an interplay between speakers' intentions and language group conventions. For this interplay, there seem to be two models : One accord? ing to which intention determines the meaning insofar as convention doesn't, and vice versa, and a second according to which intention deter? mines the meaning where it is appointed this role by convention. The first object of this paper is to show, in drawing heavily on an old example, that the second model is more plausible. If this is right, then the utterer's intention is a conventionally relevant circumstance contributing to the meaning of the utterance just like any of the other conventionally relevant circumstances (of context and situation) and no more a source of meaning than these. My second object is to call attention to two points which might help to explain why what a speaker intends is so often mis? takenly regarded as fundamental or semifundamental for meaning in a language. My example is Strawson's well-respected article 'Intention and Conven? tion in Speech Acts'6 in which he discusses our problem with respect to the interplay of intention and convention in determining the illocutionary

The Locutionary-Illocutionary Distinction

Abstract: In a recent article1 Richard Gale proposes an analysis of the fictive use of language founded on the distinction between locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts. What I wish to discuss is something which Gale has to say about the locutionary-illocutionary distinction. Implicit in his discussion of this distinction is the assumption that the locutionary content (i.e. propositional content) of any given sentence always remains constant, while the illocutionary act performed in uttering the sentence on different occasions may or may not vary. This point is made explicitly by Gale elsewhere. In his discussion of Strawson's theory of referring he contends that the attempt to avoid the absurdities engendered by Strawson's restricted theory of referring by denying that the same statement is made in two different cases in which the same sentence is used is to 'confound what is said with the illocutionary act performed'.2 What I wish to suggest, on the contrary, is that there are cases in which what is said by a given sentence (the locutionary content) may vary while the illocutionary act performed in uttering the sentence on different occasions remains constant. Gale refers to the locutionary content of a sentence as its customary sense or meaning. What I want to contend is that the customary sense or meaning of a sentence is a function not only of the semantical elements and syntactical structures which it embodies, but also a function of various other elements-specifically the stress and intonation pattern with which it is uttered; and that once the importance of this element is taken into account, Gale's position will turn out to be unable to withstand analysis. The upshot of this will be that it is incorrect to speak of the proposition expressed by a given sentence; rather we should speak of various different propositions which may be expressed by the same sentence. I will try to show that a given locutionary content of a sentence is to be identified by determining what a particular utterance of that sentence 'suggests' (in a loose sense of 'suggest' which will become clearer) and what sorts of response to it would count as appropriate. All of this will be made much clearer by an example. Consider the following sentence: