Talk:Entailment (linguistics)

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I think where the contrast is drawn in this entry between entailment and implication, this should really be a constrast between entailment and Grice's more specific term "implicature".

The things said about implication are possibly true of some uses of that word, but not of its use in mathematical logic.

I suppose in fact the same kind of point can be made about the entry as a whole. The principal uses of the term "entailment" in mathematical logic are not associated with pragmatics but with truth conditional semantics. In that context A entails B if the truth conditions for B are a subset of those for A.

I am not myself well versed in pragmatics, and am not familiar with its use in pragmatics.

Roger Jones (rbj at rbjones.com)


 * I see that the sentence was tagged as dubious. The real problem with this article is a complete lack of references (already tagged as such). As the dubious tag is so old, I'm removing it (in an effort to clear up a long backlog of such tags). – S. Rich (talk) 19:35, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Bad example?
The example:
 * (A) The president was assassinated. entails (B) The president is dead.

The truth of B does not guarantee the truth of A - the president might be dead, but he may have died of a heart attack or anything other than assassination, in which case it does not guarantee the truth of A. That said, is this example even an accurate demonstration of entailment?

This is not trying to say that B guarantees the truth of A. It's saying that A requires B. The example is a standard one in linguistics textbooks. --EastAsiaStudent (talk) 18:05, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

Another largely confusing fact about this example: The president might have been assassinated, but he does not have to be dead; An assassination can fail, after all.

Disputed
Cancellability is not the property of all kinds of implicatures; see Talk:Implicature.--Imz 19:50, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

Types of entailment
Is this edit correct? How many types of entailment are there? For example, I find this source speaking of illocutionary and truth conditional types of entailment. The article desperately needs citations anyway, but I'm afraid the topic is beyond me, so I'm hoping someone who knows their way around it can sort out what we should be saying - and ideally reference it. Yngvadottir (talk) 16:21, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

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