SENTENCE RELATIONS

Truth conditional semantics studies lexical relations by comparing predications that can be made about the
same referring expression. Its task is to account for the meaning relations between different expressions in a
language. There are several sentence relations: a & b are synonymous, a entails b, a contradicts b, a
presupposes b, a is a tautology, a is a contradiction. Entailment is the relation between two propositions—let’s
label them ‘p’ and ‘q’—such that if p is true, q must also be true, but if q is true, it does not necessarily follow
that p is true. If it is true that my necktie is (entirely) maroon, is it true that my necktie is red? If it is true that my
necktie is red, is it true that my necktie is maroon? Paraphrase is the relation between two propositions, p and
q, such that if either is true, the other is necessarily true also, and if either is false, the other is false. If it is true
that my necktie was cheap, is it true or false that my necktie was inexpensive? If it is true that my necktie was
inexpensive, is it true or false that my necktie was cheap? Contradiction is the relation between two
propositions such that if either is true, the other is necessarily false. If my necktie was cheap, is it true or false
that my necktie was expensive? If it was expensive, was it cheap?

I. ENTAILMENT

We say that a sentence p entails a sentence q just in case each conceivable situation in which p is true is a
situation in which q is also true (though the converse need not be the case, i.e. it does not have to be the
case that every conceivable situation in which q is true is a situation in which p is also true). To determine
whether a sentence p entails a sentence q, it is easiest to check whether the following holds: In every
conceivable situation in which it is true that p, it is true that q. For instance, John and Mary are happy entails
that John is happy, because the following is true: In every conceivable situation in which it is true that John and
Mary are happy, it is true that John is happy.

While the notion of entailment appears to be exceedingly simple, it has some surprisingly rich linguistic
consequences. Consider the sentence John did not eat. If we replace the VP eat with one which is
more restrictive, such as both eat and drink, we obtain another sentence, John did not both eat and
drink, which is entailed by the first one (since in every conceivable situation in which it is true that John did not
eat, it is also true that John did not both eat and drink.) The point is more general: in any sentence of the form
John did not VP1, we can replace VP1 with a more restrictive verb phrase, VP2, and obtain a new sentence that
is entailed by the first one. We say that John did not VP1 is downward-entailing with respect to its VP position
('downward', because the

entailment holds whenever VP1 is replaced with a verb phrase VP2 that applies to a subset of the things that
VP1 applies to). The notion of downward-entailment happens to provide the key to a difficult linguist
problem: the characterization of the environments in which words like any or at all can appear. *John
ate at all is ungrammatical; by contrast, John did not eat at all is fine. Because they want to be associated
with a negative word, words like at all have been called 'Negative Polarity Items'. But it is no trivial task to
characterize their distribution. A syntactic account, based on the notion of 'to be contained within a sister of
__', can derive some interesting results. But a better account is obtained by giving a semantic analysis:
Negative Polarity Items are grammatical only in downward-entailing environments.

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A speaker who understands the meaning of a sentence S understands its truth conditions. This allows him to
make further judgments about the relation of S to other sentences. For instance, any speaker will know that
John or Mary came to the party is true in exactly the same situations as Mary or John came to the party.
We say for this reason that these two sentences are equivalent. A weaker notion is that of entailment. A
sentence p entails a sentence q just in case each conceivable situation in which p is true is a situation in which
q is also true (though the converse need not be true). For instance, each situation in which John and Mary are
happy is also a situation in which John is happy (but the converse is not true - there certainly are imaginable
situations in which John is happy but Mary isn't.) To determine whether a sentence p entails a sentence q, it
is easiest to check whether the following holds:

(1) In every conceivable situation in which it is true that p, it is true that q.

Notation: We write: p => q to abbreviate: p entails q. We write: p ≠> q for: p does not entail q.

Examples

(2) a. No student came to class => No student came to class and had a good time

b. No student is over 30 years of age => No student is over 35 years of age

c. Less than five students are over 30 years of age => Less than five students are over 35 years of age

(3) a. Every student came to class ≠> Every student came to class and had a good time

b. Every student is over 30 years of age ≠> Every student is over 35 years of age

c. More than five students came to class ≠> More than five students came to class and were happy

(4) a. Every student came to class early => Every student came to class

b. More than five students are over 35 years of age => More than five students are over 30 years of age

c. No student came to class early ≠> No student came to class

Some further terminology can be useful. A sentence which is true no matter what, i.e. in every
conceivable situation, is called a tautology (example: It is raining or it is not raining). A sentence which is
false no matter what is called a contradiction (example: It is raining and it is not raining). We note for future
reference that when a sentence is followed by the negation of a sentence it entails, a contradiction is
obtained. Example: John came to class and had a good time and John didn't come to class is contradictory
(John came to class and had a good time entails John came to class; hence John came to class and had a
good time and John didn't come to class to class is a contradiction).

Note. If a sentence p entails a sentence q, p is more informative than q (because if you know that you are
in a situation in which p is true, you know immediately that you are also in a situation in which q is true).

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Other examples of entailment are

1 a. The anarchist assassinated the emperor.

1 b. The emperor died.

2a. There are tulips in the garden.

2b. There are flowers in the garden.

3c. The ladder is too short to reach the roof.

3d. The ladder isn’t long enough to reach the roof.

II. PRESUPPOSITION

Speakers know that the message conveyed in one sentence may presuppose other pieces of knowledge. For
instance, if 2a is accepted as true, 2b–2e must also be accepted as true.

2a. Andy Murfee usually drives his Datsun to work.

2b. There is a person named Andy Murfee.

2c. Andy Murfee works.

2d. There is a Datsun that belongs to Andy Murfee.

2e. Andy Murfee knows how to drive an automobile.

The meaning of sentence 2a presupposes what is expressed in 2b, c, d and e. The latter are presuppositions of
2a. Note that a presupposition does not establish the truth of anything. Sentence 2a is meaningful as it is, but it
is true only if there is a person named Andy Murfee, who works and owns a Datsun, etc. The sentence is
presented AS IF there is a person named Andy Murfee. (There probably is not since we created the sentence
for demonstration, just as the writer of a child’s arithmetic textbook turns out problems that begin “Timmy
Blake has four apples…”) These ten terms have been introduced to show the latent knowledge that people
have about their language. We are not suggesting that the points illustrated make up a test that anyone can
deal with successfully. People differ considerably, and circumstances differ considerably, so that the way
individuals behave in a given situation is not necessarily an indication of what their deeper competence is.
Personality factors, such as willingness to cooperate, memory, attention, recent experience, can greatly affect
performance. We only want to indicate the general implicit knowledge that speakers have about meaning in
their language.

Presupposition has been an important topic in semantics: the 1970s in particular saw lively debates in the
literature. Books devoted largely to the subject include Kempson (1975), D. Wilson (1975), etc, and important
papers include J. D. Fodor(1979) and Wilson and Sperber (1979).

To presuppose something means to assume it, and the narrower technical use in semantics is related to this.

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In example 2, a sentence is said to presuppose b sentence.

Example 2: a. I don’t regret leaving London.

b. I left London.

Let’s take 1 and 2 for example.

1. a. Dave is angry because Jim crashed the car.

b. Jim crashed the car.

From the table of presupposition, we can get that if ‘Dave is angry because Jim crashed the car’ is true, then
‘Jim crashed the car’ is true. If Dave isn’t angry because Jim crashed the car, then ‘Jim crashed the car’ is still
true. If Jim ‘crashed the car’ is true, Dave may be angry or not. If Jim ‘crashed the car’ is false, that means
maybe nothing happened about the car, so sentence a is meaningless.

2. a. Zaire is bigger than Alaska.

b. Alaska is smaller than Zaire.

From the table of entailment, we can get that if ‘Zaire is bigger than Alaska’ is true, then ‘Alaska is smaller than
Zaire’ is true. If ‘Alaska is smaller than Zaire’ is false, then ‘Zaire is bigger than Alaska’ is false. If ‘Zaire is bigger
than Alaska’ is false, then ‘Alaska is smaller than Zaire’ may be true or false; if ‘Alaska is smaller than Zaire’ is
true, then ‘Zaire is bigger than Alaska’ is true or false.

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PPThao. Semantics-HO13-Sentence relations. January 6, 2024
3.8 Sentence meaning

We communicate with utterances, and each utterance is an instance of a sentence. But how can we explain
what ‘sentence meaning’ is?

Two points are obvious. First, the meaning of a sentence derives from the meanings of its constituent lexemes
and from the grammatical meanings it contains. So if you know all the lexical and grammatical meanings
expressed in a sentence, you know the meaning of the sentence, and vice versa. Second, at least if the
sentence is a statement, if you know the meaning of the sentence, you know what conditions are necessary in
the world for that sentence to be true.

2. Albert Thompson opened the first flour mill in Waterton.

You don’t know whether this sentence is true or not, but you know that if it is true, there must exist (at some
time) a person named Albert Thompson and a place called Waterton (presuppositions), that Albert Thompson
opened a flour mill, and that there was no flour mill in Waterton before Albert Thompson opened his mill
(entailments). You know that if this sentence is true, the sentence Albert Thompson did not open the first flour
mill in Waterton is false (a contradiction).

Truth-conditional semantics is based on the notion that the core meaning of any sentence (any statement) is its
truth conditions.

Any speaker of the language knows these conditions. If a sentence is true (or false), what other sentences,
expressing partly the same, partly different conditions, can be judged by this sentence? If a given sentence is
true, does this make another sentence also true, or does it falsify the other sentence, or is there no truth
relation?

Matters of truth and logic are of more importance in truth-conditional semantics than meanings of lexemes per
se. Chapter 5 contains more about truth-conditional semantics.

We are not yet finished with the dimensions of meaning. Often we derive more meaning from what we hear or
read than what is actually in the message. Perhaps this is due to an intuition we have or to the fact that the
speaker or writer infers something—hints at some further meaning. In semantics we are not interested in
intuitions or hints but we are interested in the instances when the language of the message implicates some
additional meaning that accounts for our inference.

Let’s look at some examples.

3. One team consisted of six students from Felman College.

Let’s say that this sentence represents an utterance that is part of a larger discourse. We understand what it
means even though we are unfamiliar with Felman College (if such an entity exists) because we know the
lexical and grammatical meanings of the components and we can deduce that Felman College names an entity
similar to some that we do know. And we can infer more than this. From the phrase one team we infer that
the larger discourse contains information about at least one other team. Is this in the meaning of the lexeme
team? Is a team composed of people necessarily in competition with another team or other teams? Does our
PPThao. Semantics-HO13-Sentence relations. January 6, 2024
inference come from the fact that one team is paradigmatically related to a second team, another team, and so
on? Next, compare:

4. One team consisted of the six students from Felman College.

Sentences 3 and 4 tell the same thing about the composition of the team but 4 is more informative—has more
meaning—about students from Felman College. From 3 we can infer that there were at least six students from
Felman College. Sentence 4 says that there were only six students from Felman College.

We take up implication again in Chapter 3.

PPThao. Semantics-HO13-Sentence relations. January 6, 2024