Entailment 蕴含 Shaozhong Liu, Ph.D. (Pragmatics) / Ph.D. (Higher Education) School of Foreign Studies, Guilin University of Electronic Technology Homepage:

Entailment蕴含

Shaozhong Liu, Ph.D. (Pragmatics) / Ph.D. (Higher Education)School of Foreign Studies, Guilin University of Electronic

TechnologyHomepage: www.gxnu.edu.cn/Personal/szliu

Blog: cyrusliu.blog.163.com Email: [email protected]

3/29/2013 Essentials in Pragmatics, Spring 2013 1

Objectives and SLOs• Objectives1) To familiarize students with the concept of

Entailment2) To illustrate it with examples3) To discuss its place in Pragmatics• Student learning outcomes (SLOs)1) To be able to define Entailment2) To be able to distinguish it from other concepts in

meaning study3) To be able to see its meaning in Pragmatics3/29/2013 Essentials in Pragmatics, Spring 2013 2

What on earth is entailment?• Generally speaking, entailment is not a pragmatic

concept (i.e. having to do with speaker meaning), but instead is considered a purely logical concept, symbolized by ||-. Some examples of entailment for the sentence in (1) are represented in (2).

• (1) Rover chased three squirrels. (=p)• (2) a. Something chased three squirrels. (=q)• b. Rover did something to three squirrels. (=r)• c. Rover chased three of something. (=s)• d. Something happened. (=t)


Inference

• Words and sentences do not tell us meanings by themselves; it’s us who draw meanings from words and sentences.

• An inference is a meaning we draw from an utterance.


Entailment as inference• Declaratives or statements carry entailments;

others, such as imperatives and interrogatives, do not.

• Declaratives and statements can be true and false.

• Entailments are inferences that can be drawn solely from our knowledge about the semantic relationships in a language. (Peccei, 1999/2002, p.14)

• If the original sentence is true, the entailment can be true.


• An entailment is a relationship between sentences that forms the basis for some inferences. (Peccei, 1999/2002, p.9)


Entailments are everywhere!

• Last year was rather hard for them. • But you must work three months on our

campus.• …• Where “year” (everyone knows) it’s 12

months and “month” (everyone knows) it’s 30 days.


Entailments can be redundant informers!

• “slips (of tongue)” from radio and television announcers:

a. It’s been an amazing year for Crystal Palace over the past 12 months.

b. The robbery was committed by a pair of identical twins, both are said to be about age 20.

c. Send in your competition answers with your name, age, and how old you are.

d. So you’re a housewife and a mother. Do you have any children?


Features of entailments• Analytic sentences: a. My mother is a woman.b. My mother is a doctor.c. The tiger is unhappy.d. The tiger is an animal.(without knowing anything about my mother or the tiger

in question, you can quite easily answer ‘true’ to (a) and (d) because of your knowledge of English. These sentences are necessarily true because of the meaning relationship between the words ‘mother’ and ‘woman’ and between ‘tiger’ and ‘animal’.) (Peccei, 1999/2002.p.10)


• Contradictions:e. My mother is a boy.f. The tiger is a reptile.(given that you interpret everything literally, you

can easily answer ‘false’ to (e) and (f); the meanings of ‘mother’ and ‘boy’ and ‘tiger’ and ‘reptile’ make such sentences necessarily false or contradictions. ) (Peccei, 1999/2002, p.10)


• Synthetic sentences:b. My mother is a doctor.c. The tiger is unhappy.(However, (b) and © present you with a problem.

They may or may not be true. You cannot verify the truth or falsity of those statements by looking in your dictionary. You would need other, non-linguistic, information about my mother and the particular tiger I am referring to. These are sometimes referred to as synthetic sentences.) (Peccei, 1999/2002. p.10)


• Synthetically true:If it turns out that my mother actually is a doctor or

that the tiger is unhappy, we would say that these statements are synthetically true; that is their truth is based on what is happening in the world, not on what is happening in the language. ) (Peccei, 1999/2002, p.10)

• Synthetically false:If my mother is an engineer rather than a doctor

and the tiger is quite happy, we would say that these statements are synthetically false. (Peccei, 1999/2002, p.10)


Advantages of entailments• Entailing empower language and enables us

ample chance to be more flexible in speech, and hence more expressive in communication.

• E.g.:1)a. Annie caught a trout. b. Annie caught a fish.2) a. Annie is thin. b. Annie is not fat.3) a. Annie baked a cake. b. Annie baked something.


• Each pair is synthetically true. ‘once we establish the truth of sentence (a), sentence (b) becomes automatically true because of the meaning relationships between trout/fish, thin/fat, and cake/something. In each case, we can say that sentence (b) is an entailment of sentence (a).) (Peccei, 1999/2002, p.11)


Paraphrase as a form of entailment

• All sentences have a number of entailments. That is, other (entailed) sentences which are automatically true if the original sentence is true. The thing about entailment is that this kind of inference is ‘for free’. It requires only a knowledge of the semantic system of the language being used.

• In semantics, a paraphrase is a special kind of entailment.


• More examples of paraphrase as entailment:1)a. Goldilocks (金发女孩，出自 Goldilocks and

three bears) saw a bear. b. Goldilocks saw an animal.2)a. This porridge is too cold. b. This porridge is not too hot.3)a. Baby Bear cried. b. Baby Bear wept.4)a. Mama Bear is in front of Papa Bear. b. Papa Bear is behind Mama Bear.


Allusions as entailment• Until recently, financial markets appeared to be betting that

the Goldilocks economy—neither too hot, nor too cold—was safe from the bears. 前为止，金融市场显现的趋势是 , 市场不会太热或太冷，而会相对安全。

• What we’re hoping for is a Goldilocks solution, where the economy starts to boom again but the price of oil doesn’t. 我们所希望的就是一个如金发姑娘般的解决方法，一个经济开始迅速发展而油价不急剧上涨的解决方法。

• Goldilocks economy 金发女郎经济，温和经济• 以上来源于：《 21世纪大英汉词典》


Types of entailments• One-way entailment (): sentences 1-2:1) a. Goldilocks saw a bear. b. Goldilocks saw an animal.2) a. This porridge is too cold. b. This porridge is not too hot.(if Goldilocks saw a bear, she necessarily saw an animal.

But if she saw an animal, she could have seen a bear but not necessarily. It could have been a big wolf, for example.) (Peccei, 1999/2002, p.12)

• (when there is only one-way entailment, the sentences are not true paraphrases of each other. )


• Two-way / mutual entailment (): sentences 3-4:3) a. Baby Bear cried. b. Baby Bear wept.4) a. Mama Bear is in front of Papa Bear. b. Papa Bear is behind Mama Bear.• (when the meaning relationship between sentences are

mutually inclusive, it is a situation of two-way or mutual entailment.)

• (two-way or mutual entailments are sentences of paraphrases of each other.)

• (Generally speaking, ‘entailment’, ‘analytic sentence’, and ‘contradictions’ are considered to be purely semantic concepts, having to do with sentence meaning rather than speaker meaning.) (Peccei, 1999/2002, p.12)


Pragmatic entailments• The information in the following dialogs seems

redundant or contradictory form a semantic point of view, however, sensemaking in pragmatics:

• A. Tom: What’s your stepmother like? Bob: Well, she’s a woman and she married my father.• B Dave: There’s your Uncle George. Lucy: That man’s a snake.• C Jane: You ate all the cookies! Steve: I ate some of the cookies.


Foregrounding: intent + strategy

• A sentence may have many (one-way) entailments. E.g.: “the painters broke the window” may entail:

• “someone broke the window.”• “the painters did something to the window.”• The painters broke something.”• …(when uttering “the painters broke the window” in a

context, a speaker will have one of these entailments in mind as the main focus, the most important one for interpreting the message.) (Peccei, 1999/2002, p.13)


• One way for the speaker to communicate the most important message to the hearer is to stress one of the words in an utterance, or foregrounding a particular entailment. Like in the following:

• Utterance a: Annie RUINED the sweater.• Utterance b: Annie ruined the SWEATER.• Utterance c: ANNIE ruined the sweater.• Entailment 1: ‘someone ruined the sweater.’• Entailment 2: ‘Annie did something to the sweater.”• Entailment 3: ‘Annie ruined something.’


• Utterance a has foregrounded Entailment 2. Message: ‘you and I are taking for granted that Annie did something to the sweater. I’m telling you what Annie did.’

• Utterance b has foregrounded Entailment 3. Message: ‘you and I are taking fro granted that Annie ruined something. I’m telling what Annie ruined.’

• Utterance c has foregrounded Entailment 1. Message: ‘you an di are taking for granted that someone ruined the sweater. I’m telling you that Annie did it.’


So, what’s entailment?• All sentences have a number of entailments – other

sentences which are automatically true if the original sentence is true.

• Entailments are inferences that can be drawn solely from our knowledge about the semantic relationships in a language.

• This knowledge allows us to communicate much more than we actually ‘say’.

• Each of these different messages illustrate how more can be communicated than simply “what is said’. The importance given to one entailment over another by a speaker has important consequences for the pragmatic analysis of that utterance. (Peccei, 1999/2002, p.14)


Entailment as pragmatic strategy and analytical tool• Ex.2.11 The following are from Howlers by Russell Ash (1985)

and The 776 Stupidest Things Ever Said by Ross and Kathryn Petras (1994). Where has the communication gone wrong? Or has it?

a. All creatures are imperfect bests. Man alone is the perfect beast.

b. The brain of a woman is almost as heavy as a human brain.c. A coroner’s duty is to decide whether a person died a fatal

death.d. We do not have censorship. What we have is a limitation on

what newspapers can report.e. Snakes are two sexes, poisonous and non-poisonous.f. I have reiterated over and over again what I have said before.


• Ex.2.12 Look at these pairs of utterances. The sentences being uttered in each pair are arguably semantic paraphrases of each other (in a relationship of mutual entailment). Do you think they communicate the same information?

1) a. that food was delicious. b. that grub was yummy.2) a. she designs clothes for adult male humans. b. she designs clothes for men.3) a. that guy’s a bachelor. b. that guy never got married.


Summary

• Entailment (pragmatics)• In pragmatics (linguistics), entailment is the

relationship between two sentences where the truth of one (A) requires the truth of the other (B).

• For example, the sentence (A) The president was assassinated. entails (B) The president is dead. Notice also that if (B) is false, then (A) must necessarily be false. To show entailment, we must show that (A) true forces (B) to be true and (B) false forces (A) to be false.


• Entailment differs from implicature (in their definitions for pragmatics), where the truth of one (A) suggests the truth of the other (B), but does not require it.[dubious – discuss] For example, the sentence (A) Mary had a baby and (B) got married implicates that (A) she had a baby before (B) the wedding, but this is cancellable by adding -- not necessarily in that order. Entailments are not cancellable.


• Entailment also differs from presupposition in that in presupposition, the truth of what one is presupposing is taken for granted. A simple test to differentiate presupposition from entailment is negation. For example, both The king of France is ill and The king of France is not ill presuppose that there is a king of France. However The president was not assassinated no longer entails The president is dead(nor its opposite, as the president could have died in another way). In this case, presupposition remains under negation, but entailment does not.


• Types of Entailment• There are three types of entailment: • formal or logical entailment, • analytic entailment, • synthetic entailment.


References

• Hurford, J. and Heasley, B. (1988). Semantics: A Coursebook. (Units 9-11). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• Simpson, P. (1993). Language, Ideology and Point of View. (Chapter 5). London: Routledge.

• Yule, G. (1996). Pragmatics. (Chapter 4). Oxford: Oxford University Press.


Documents

Entailment 蕴含 Shaozhong Liu, Ph.D. (Pragmatics) / Ph.D. (Higher Education) School of Foreign Studies, Guilin University of Electronic Technology Homepage: