TEXT B
A perennial problem in semantics is the delineation of its subject matter. The term meaning can be used in a variety of ways, and only some of these correspond to the usual understanding of the scope of linguistic or computational semantics. We shall take the scope of semantics to be restricted to the literal interpretations of sentences in a context, ignoring phenomena like irony, metaphor, or conversational implicature.
A standard assumption in computationally oriented semantics is that knowledge of the meaning of a sentence can be equated with knowledge of its truth conditions: that is, knowledge of what the world would be like if the sentence were true. This is not the same as knowing whether a sentence is true, which is usually an empirical matter, but knowledge of truth conditions is a prerequisite for such verification to be possible. Meaning as truth conditions needs to be generalized somewhat for the case of imperatives or question
A. Irony.
B. Literal interpretations of sentences m a context.
C. Metaphor.
D. Conversational implicature.
Only recently has biology begun to see
itself as an information technology. An organism’s physiology and behavior are
dictated largely by its genes. And those genes contain information written in
code that is surprisingly similar to the digital code that computer scientists
have devised for the storage and transmission of other information. There are some differences, of Course. The genetic code has four elements (known as bases or letters), while a computer’s binary code has only two. And the bases of genetic code are grouped together in threes rather than in the eight-bit bytes of computing. But the similarities are so striking that biology is suddenly undergoing a serious amount of computerization. At the same time, there has been rapid progress in the machines that supply the raw material for the A. A shortage of research funds. B. A reluctance to acquire advanced mathematical skills. C. An insufficient knowledge of computer languages. D. An unwillingness to work cooperatively with mathematicians. [单项选择] {{B}}TEXT D{{/B}}
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