Assignment# 3

Presupposition and Entailment

Subject: Pragmatics

Submitted to: Dr. Nazir Malik

Submited by: Hummara Aakfah Riyadh

Roll No : 01161026

Department of English Literature and Linguistics

 Pragmatics

Presuppositions and Entailment

Pragmatics

Introduction:

Pragmatics is the study of speaker meaning.

 The study of contextual meaning.

 How more gets communicating than is said.
 Expression of relative distance.

Presupposition

Introduction:

Presupposition is an implicit assumption about the world/background relating to an

utterance whose truth is taken for granted into discourse. It is used to explain two kinds of linguistics
facts.

First fact: it is about the relationship between the presupposition required by complex sentence and the
presupposition required by their constituent sentence, the projection problem
Second fact: The behavior of different kind of factive verb. E.g.
 The king of France is bald
 The king of France is not bald
 Is the king of France bald?
 If the king of the France is bald, he should wear the hat in the winter.
There is a king of France.

Entailment

Introduction:

Entailment is a relation between sentence meaning or presupposition. A sentence (meaning)

A, entails B (A=B) if whenever A is true than B must be true. Entailment is very strong kind of
implication. It is a semantic relation. Thus, its holds no matter what the facts of the world happen to be (it
holds in all possible words).Something that follows logically from what is asserted in the utterance.

Who has entailments?

Sentences do.

 She has two dogs (entails: she has two animals)

 Ali broke the window (A) = the window broke (B).
 Everyone passed the examination (A), No one failed the examination (B).
A entails B.
 Comparison between entailment and presupposition

Entailment Presupposition

 The relationship between two sentences  Presupposition is often treated as the

where the truth of one (A) requires the relationship between the presuppositions.
truth of the other (B).  More speaker dependent notion.
 Naturally logic and less discussed.

Types of presupposition:

Types Example

Existential The king of my heart.

Factive I don’t know that you are smart.

Lexical He finally won the competition.

Structural Who murdered him?

Non-factive He pretended to be happy.

Counterfactual If were the students of Shakespeare.

Internal presupposition: thoughts.

Unconscious assumptions that lead to our belief and habits (self talk).

External presupposition: spoken.

Content that is glossed over because attention is directed elsewhere (direct instructions).