Lecture 2 Ling 442

Review/Preview Qs 1. What does our theory of semantics say about the following two syntactic categories? I.e. what semantic entities are they associated with? names E.g. Seattle sentences E.g. Portland is in Washington State. 2. What are the two levels of meaning proposed by Frege? 3. What is presupposition? 4. What is implicature?

notation  = the meaning of  Barack Obama = Seattle =

cow = happy =

Implicature (P. Grice) Rules of conversation Principle of relevance (22) We don’t want any rows about politics. Principle of informativeness (no need to distinguish between type 1 and type 2) (24a) Most of them passed.

Context Dependency Indexicality/deixis I, you, here, there, now, then, etc They are arguably part of pragmatics in that their denotations cannot be determined unless how/where/when the sentence containing them is used. E.g. Think about I, here.

Presuppositions Some of what a sentence conveys is not asserted; it is presupposed. Roughly: a presupposition is something that is taken for granted for the sentence to be used felicitously. Did you stop embezzling public funds? I would like another beer. The Kind of France is bald. (controversial)

Entailment Concept closely related to presupposition. Main difference: When p presupposes q, the falsity of q results in p’s not being felicitous. When p entails q, the falsity of q results in the falsity of p.

Predicate Logic (basics) binary: and, or, if … then, iff (if and only if) unary: it is not the case that … , , ,   Syntax: S  S Conn S, S   S Semantics: E.g. S1  S2 = true iff S1 = true and S2 = true Similarly for other connectives.