Implicature (含义关系)
• Definition: in communicative practice, the speaker may use an utterance to imply further information.
He or she may imply what he or she does not literally( 字面地) mean. And sometimes it largely depends on the context.
P: I have been to Zhoushan q: I have been to Zhejiang
• • • • • •
Composite Truth Table for Entailment P q T T F T or F F ← F T or F ← T
Two sources of entailment
• The regular source: hyponymy(下义关系) between lexical items. • A: I saw a boy. • b: I saw a child. Child and boy is a kind of hyponymy. • The other source: syntax. • A: A boy chased a dog. • B: A dog was chased by a boy. • When two sentences mutually entail each other, like A and B, we may also call them paraphrase.
Presupposition
• Definition: it refers to what is assumed by the speaker and assumed by him or her to be known to the hearer before he or she makes the utterance.
(p) Marry’s dog is barking. (q) Marry has a dog. • • • • • Composite Truth Table for Presupposition p q T T F T T or F ← T
ENTAILMENT vs. PRESUPPOSITION
• Presupposition canห้องสมุดไป่ตู้be distinguished
from entailment in the negation test(否 定命题). • implications preserved under negation in Presuppositions. • But implications not preserved under negation in Entailments.
Entailment
• Definition: an entailment refers to something that logically follows what is asserted in the utterance.
• Such an intersentential semantic relationship, according to Saeed, can be defined by the truth as follows: • A sentence p entails a sentence q when the truth of the first p guarantees the truth of q, and the falsity of the second q guarantees the falsity of p.
• In the following example, the utterance (a) in some situations may taken as a request (b). • (a) Don’t you think it’s quite stuffy here? • (b) Would you please open the windows to air the room?
5.2.5 Intersentential
Semantic Relations
By A09英语2 周科
In this section we are going to study the semantic relationship between sentences. And we will mainly focus on those three kinds of intersentential semantic relations: entailment, presupposition and implicature