[SOLVED] LINC12 Fall 2024 Practice Exercise 2

Practice Exercise 2

LINC12 Fall 2024

Sept 13, 2024

Practice exercise due: Wednesday September 18, 23:59 on Quercus

Entailments vs. Presuppositions

For the following pairs of sentences, decide whether the second sentence is an entailment of the first, or is a presupposition, or whether there is no relation. Support your answer by performing test(s), evaluating the results, and describing the conclusions.

Some strategies you will want to use:

• p → q iff p & ¬q is a contradiction. Try to construct a sentence of this form. and decide whether it is contradictory.

• To show that p does not entail q, find a situation where p is true and q is false

• To show that p presupposes q, construct a sentence with a non-veridical environment, and put the sentence of p in the environment, and then test whether or not q is still entailed

(1) a. It’s late at night.

b. My sister is tired.

(2) a. My sister forgot that she had to finish an assignment tonight.

b. My sister had an assignment to finish tonight.

(3) a. Maria is a paediatrician.

b. Maria is a doctor.

(4) a. Gregor re-installed that addicting game on his computer.

b. Gregor used to have an addicting game on his computer.

(5) a. Many people are interested in learning Korean these days.

b. At least some people are interested in learning Korean.

(6) a. My best friend from the Philippines moved to Toronto in February, 2023.

b. He was in Toronto in March, 2023.