The difference between entailment and presupposition

Abstract

Scholars have been concentrating on the issue of how to assist listeners in understanding the speaker’s meaning because “literal sentence meaning” is not always equivalent to “speaker utterance meaning.” It is possible to comprehend “literal sentence meaning” and “speaker utterance meaning” through comprehending entailment and presupposition. Because these two concepts play a huge role in interpreting language. By reviewing a large number of literatures, the author of this paper summarizes the fundamental differences in characteristics between entailment and presupposition, that is, entailment is more stable than presupposition. This difference in characteristics leads to great differences between them in practical application. Presupposition is suited to situations needing much speaker utterance meaning, such as political speech, commercial advertisements, psychiatric treatment, etc., while entailment is applicable to conviction and sentencing, criminal investigation and reasoning, and other strict cases with clear linguistic meaning. At the same time, there are a few issues with the application that are important to note. If a presupposition is used in an entailment situation, it may have a negative effect on the speaker. And when using the presupposition, the speaker should be aware that the words may cause damage to his or her reputation.