Entailment Sentence meaning vs. pragmatic meaning Chapter 2 Entailment Sentence meaning vs. pragmatic meaning

Recap on lecture one What is learned so far: Give a semantic paraphrase to the following sentences then put them in different contexts and give pragmatic paraphrases to them as utterances: I am busy now Leave me alone I bet he is right Are you kidding? I have a test tomorrow

Chapter 2: Learning outcomes: By the end of this lecture, students will be able to: Analyze different ways of interpreting meaning: Define entailment. Determine the truth conditions of sentences as either Analytic sentences Contradictions Synthetic sentences: synthetically true or false Paraphrase sentences through doing one way- entailment & two- way entailment. Analyze entailment in different contexts.

Introduction: What are the shared/ distinctive components of meaning in the following words? Check them out in a dictionary: 1- girl- woman- spinster- lady- widow- princess- doe- mare- madam 2- boy- man- Prince- bachelor- widower- mayor- chairman- stallion- 3- what does each word entail and what is wrong with the meaning of the following sentences: A man is pregnant! My father’s wife is a snake! He is 20 years old yet he lived for 240 months. The defendant is innocent yet he was found guilty of the crime! See more examples in the book p. 9

What is entailment? Go + movement + with legs Entailment is the meaning properties of a lexical item- i.e. the meaning components of a given word: e.g. a verb like Go + movement + with legs + destination (somewhere) What about the verb “run”

+ young + female Entailment- What is it? + married girl Woman Widow + dead husband

girl Woman Widow + female + young Entailment- what is it? + married + dead husband

Truth conditions of sentences: Analytic sentences: E.g. My mother is a woman Contradictions: E.g. My mother is a male Synthetic sentences: synthetically true or false E.g. My mother is kind

Identify the truth conditions of the following sentences as analytic/ contradictor / Synthetically true or false The tiger is an animal The tiger is unhappy. My mother is a boy. The tiger is a reptile.

Identify the truth conditions of the following sentences: Which of the following sentences cannot be designated as ‘true’ or ‘false’ unless you have extra non-linguistic information? (a) My hamster is a mammal. (b) My cousin is a girl. (c) My sister is a girl. (d) My sister is female. (e) I saw a female rock. (f) I saw a female tortoise. (g) My cat likes ice-cream. (h) My sick cat is not well.

What is the pragmatic meaning of the following utterances? Tom: What’s your stepmother like? Bob: She’s a woman and she is married to my father. Dave: That’s your Uncle George. Lucy: That man is a snake. Jane: You ate all the cookies Steve: I ate some of the cookies

How to Paraphrase There are a variety of ways that you could paraphrase “Cats drink cream”. You could change (a) individual words (b) the sentence structure, or (c) both the Paraphrase Domestic felines consume the liquid fat of milk. Cream is drunk by cats. The liquid fat of milk is drunk by domestic felines.

How to paraphrase Lexical paraphrase: providing synonyms Structural paraphrase: passive is one Paraphrases can produce either a One- way entailment or a two way entailment: E.g. I saw a snake I saw an a reptile I saw an animal I saw something A snake was seen by me! What is the difference between the paraphrases above?

One way vs. two- way entailment For each sentence (a)–(d) provide two entailments. One should be a one-way entailment as in these examples: Ed caught a trout→Ed caught a fish Original sentence Entailment The blimp was over the house→ Something was over the house Original sentence Entailment and one should be a two-way (mutual) entailment as in these examples: Ed caught a trout↔Ed captured a trout The blimp was over the house↔The house was under the blimp

Examples of one-way vs. two way entailment 1. (a) Annie caught a trout 1. (b) Annie caught a fish 2 (a) Annie baked a cake 2 (b) Annie baked something In each case, we can say that sentence (b) is an entailment of sentence (a). All sentences have a number of entailments. That is, other sentences which are automatically true if the original sentence is true. There are two other types of entailment, namely one-way entailment and two- way (or mutual) entailment.  One-way entailment is the entailment that works in only one direction. Meanwhile two-way entailment is the entailment that has meaning relationship and the sentences that contain mutual entailment are paraphrases of each other.

One way- entailment & two- way entailment Look at the sentences below and decide if this is a one-way entailment and two- way entailment: Goldilocks saw a bear. Goldilocks saw an animal. Bear is an animal but animal is not necessarily a bear. This means that the entailment works in only one direction. Goldilocks saw something. A bear was seen by Goldilocks. Baby bear cried. Some animal cried. Baby bear did something. Baby bear wept.

Look at the following pairs of sentences and identify if the relationship is a one-way or two-way entailment- explain why? John destroyed the building. John burnt the building. John burnt something. Jane is smart. Jane is not stupid. Jane is a genius. The water is hot. The water is not cold.

Exercises: continued He is your employee. You are his employer. She is your student. You are her teacher

HW & assignment Study chapter 1 & 2 Do exam exercises Do ex. 1.8, 1.11 & ex. 2.5, 2.7, 2.9 & 2.10