Definition Of Implicature and Denotation
Answer these 4 questions creatively. Each answer should
be 300 words.
1) What is implicature and Denotation? Provide examples.
2) According to the speech act theory by Austin and Searle, there are three
levels: Locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary.
3) Are all languages equally complicated with regard to semantics and
Pragmatics?
4) Explain the following generality: “Entailment holds between
propositions”.
Solution
1. Implicature and Denotation
In human lives, language plays a very important role since it is a social phenomenon. The
main goal of the language is to allow an individual to communicate and understand others; the
intention of speaking is to pass a specific purpose or information, he or she wants to convey a
message through that language. Understanding Implicature and Denotation is very important to
understand language and its meaning. Implicature and denotation help many people to conceive
the conditions and put the information in a way that they are necessarily free from pragmatic
considerations, for every linguistically acceptable sentence of a language, implicature and
denotation must be understood by studying and examining their interface.
An implicature is something that is just inferred from an utterance and is not a condition
for the truth of the utterance, for example, James is rich, but not happy, the sentence implies that
richness and happiness are not compatible. This sentence implies James is not happy in spite of
being rich. In order to understand an utterance, an individual should go beyond the literal
meaning interpretation of the information passed and also, he or she should go beyond
proposition analysis of the information given. There should be an existence of unity of what is
being said and what the actual implication (Mayr, 2013) is.
Understanding implicature provides an account of the possibility to give a meaning that
extends beyond the literal expressions that are uttered by the conventional sense and understand
the speaker within the literary work. On the other hand, denotation is generally defined as literal
or overall meanings of a word in contrast to its connotative or associated meanings and also by
understanding the extension syntactic structure. Usually many words are associated with the use
in the speaker’s mind, thus, denotation is a constant relationship in a language which is
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independent of word use; for example, the word nurse has the denotation meaning that man or a
woman who takes care of patients in the hospital.
2. According to the speech act theory by Austin and Searle, there are three levels:
Locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary.
Locutionary is the utterance of a sentence with determinate sense and reference, it can
also be simply mean saying something that makes sense in the language and follows the
grammatical rules of language that are generally known; for example, in saying that i am hungry,
the locutionary meaning is that I feel hungry. Usually, locutionary is mostly related to the
inherent meaning of the lexical item and it is the province of semantics in understanding
language. Locutionary helps an individual to use specific words while expressing the basic,
literal meanings of the words.
Illocutionary involves the speaker using words in saying something with appropriate
intentions and in an appropriate actual context, rather than by virtue of having produced a
particular effect by saying something. In addition passing information is through the medium of
language: stating, warning, wishing and also promising. The illocutionary meaning can also be
referred as the social function of the words or the way they are intended to be understood by the
listeners, for example, by saying that I am hungry, may actually be a way of asking the other
person to give you food. In this case the listener interprets what is being communicated and the
intention is not a direct.
Prelocutionary involves the using of words and the bringing about the effects on the
audience by means of uttering the words; the effects of the words are bringing a special to the
circumstances of utterance. The words and actions in Prelocutionary go beyond the
communication part lead to personal feeling to the listeners such as annoying, frightening and
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maybe tricking. The contrasts between illocutionary and prelocutionary lies by lists of verbs for
example illocutionary words may: report, request, suggest and announce while Prelocutionary
words May: persuade, deceive, encourage, irritate, frighten, or even amuse. Prelocutionary
usually produces an effect in the hearer by means of the utterance and it is outside the province
of semantics and pragmatics (Cooren, 2015).
3. Are all languages equally complicated with regard to semantics and Pragmatics?
Generally, learning any new language can be difficult and complicated this is because
language is constantly changing and it entails many rules on how to pronounce some words
differs. Semantics and pragmatics are both involving complex methods of understanding the
meaning because they both have different focuses where semantics focuses on the relation
between signifiers, while pragmatics studies the ways in which context contributes to the
meaning of the words (Carston, 2013). Different languages have different phonemes, the
phonemes can often complicate the language for those trying to learn how to speak and write it.
Learning a language could be easier when the phonemes transfer across language, it is a positive
transfer, but when they are negative brings about negative transfer, while learning many
individuals may find it difficult to make the transfer.
With regard to semantics shows the meaning of words or how they are used in sentences.
Having a proper grammatical sentence structure is often a difficult thing to learn a language; the
learner can be taught how to look for clues within a sentence to understand its meaning at the
initial stages and takes lots of planning. Therefore, the semantics is an important idea in the
development and understanding a language. On the other hand, in pragmatics, while learning a
language involves how an individual communicates based on the situation he or she is in. The
use different pragmatics in the certain situation determines how an individual will react. It is
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important to learn pragmatics as soon as possible because it assists an individual to feel
comfortable in their surroundings. Furthermore, learning a language becomes because in most
cases it is difficult for an individual to provide a distinction is between semantics and pragmatics
because because they, both concerning the transmission of meaning through language but have
different application.
4. Entailment holds between propositions.
Entailment is a logical relation in which the truth of one or more propositions guarantees
the truth of another proposition an individual may form a proposition in by conjoining different
premises considering the nature of conjunctions, as long as all the premises are conjoined, it does
not matter which order they are in. Generally, entailment relates to propositions and in the case
where propositions are not sentences but phrases. Confusing sentences for propositions is not
Entailment. Entailment can be described as the meaning that is present on every occasion when
an expression occurs’ and the relation between two or more sentences where the truth of one
proposition depends upon the truth of another, and can be contained within it.
Entailment mainly is interested in the ways in which the meaning of a complex sentence
may come to depend upon the meaning of elementary sentences. In most cases, individual have
the content that is about the truth-dependencies of complex propositions on elementary ones, but
this presupposes that all problems concerning meaning have to be considered. Usually, the
symbolism of propositional is a formal language created with the intention of formalizing ways
of truth-dependency. It is a logically interesting exercise because it enables us to relate the
meaning of the whole to the meaning of the parts, for example, in dealing with a sentence that
can be used to assert a conjunctive proposition. Finally, understanding Entailment is a common
term used in the study of semantics, thus individual argues that ‘semantics can be defined as the
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study of entailments’. Activities in the entailment involve action performed by a reader or
listener in drawing conclusions that are not explicit in what is said. In addition, it is any
conclusion that one is reasonably entitled to draw from a sentence or utterance (Zucchi, 2013).
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References
Mayr, C. (2013). 6 Implicatures of modified numerals. From Grammar to Meaning, 139.
Cooren, F. (2015). Speech Act Theory. The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social
Interaction.
Carston, R. (2013). 12. implicature, explicature, and truth-theoretic semantics. The Semantics-
Pragmatics Boundary in Philosophy, 261.
Zucchi, A. (2013). The language of propositions and events: Issues in the syntax and the
semantics of nominalization (Vol. 51). Springer Science & Business Media.
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