Encyclopedia > Entailment

  Article Content

Entailment

In pragmatics (linguistics), entailment is the relationship between two sentences where the truth of one requires the truth of the other. For example, the sentence The president was assassinated. entails The president is dead..

Entailment differs from implication, where the truth of one suggests the truth of the other, but does not require it. For example, the sentence Mary had a baby and got married implicates that she had a baby before the wedding, but this is cancellable by adding -- not necessarily in that order. Entailments are not cancellable.

Entailment also differs from presupposition in that in presupposition, the truth of what one is presupposing is taken for granted.



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
242

... century - 4th century Decades: 190s 200s 210s 220s 230s - 240s - 250s 260s 270s 280s 290s Years: 237 238 239 240 241 - 242 - 243 244 245 246 ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 147.1 ms