Pragmatics-Entailment

1. 2014.12.02
Course: Pragmatics
Presenter: 49972120 余允中 Maggie
Instructor: Professor Huang

2. Outline
 Exercise 1
 Entailment
 Exercise 3
 Exercise 2
 Analytic / Synthetic / Contradiction

3. Exercise 1
 It’s been an amazing year for Crystal Palace over the
past 12 months.
 The robbery was committed by a pair of identical
twins, both are said to be about age 20.
 Send in your competition answers with your name, age,
and how old you are.
 So you’re a housewife and a mother. Do you have any
children?

4. Exercise 1
 Examples
 There is a cat with four legs.
 陳先生，請問您貴姓?
There is a dog with three legs.

5. Entailment
 Generally speaking, entailment is not a pragmatic
concept, but instead is considered a purely logical
concept, symbolized by ||.
-- Yule, George “Pragmatics”
 A relationship between two sentences such that if
the first is true, the second must also be true.
Having to do with
speaker meaning

6. Exercise 3
 Annie caught a trout.
 Annie caught a fish.
 Annie is thin.
 Annie is not fat.
 Annie baked a cake.
 Annie baked something.
A
B
B is an entailment of A.
A entails (||) B.
Hyponym

7. Exercise 3
 Examples
 David stole a pound of beef.
 David took a pound of beef.
 全班的學生都喜歡英文。
 有人喜歡英文。

8. Exercise 2
 My mother is a woman.
 My mother is a doctor.
 The tiger is unhappy.
 The tiger is an animal.
 My mother is a boy.
 The tiger is a reptile.
True
True
False
False
Unknown
Unknown

9. Analytic / Synthetic / Contradiction
 An analytic sentence is one that is necessarily true, as a
result of the meaning of the words in it.
 A contradiction is a sentence that is necessarily false,
as a result of the meaning of the words in it.
 A synthetic sentence is one which is not analytic but
may be either true or false depending on the way the
world is.

10. Analytic / Synthetic / Contradiction
 You would need other, non-linguistic, information
about my mother and the particular tiger I am
referring to.
 Synthetically True
 Synthetically False

11. Analytic / Synthetic / Contradiction
 Examples
影帝張家輝入行以來因和“大哥”張學友外形十分相像，多讓人誤會
為張學友的親弟弟，而張家輝對此毫不避諱更大呼 “張學友確實是我
哥”、 “他很有個人魅力”等等，對“大哥”張學友的敬愛之情溢於言
表。“親大哥”是假，兩人確為多年好友，私下關係好到足以“兄弟”
相稱。此次騙倒眾網友，同樣也得到粉絲的稱讚“影帝好演技！”