P.

Schlenker - Ling 1 - Introduction to the Study of Language UCLA, Winter 2006

Introduction to Language - Lecture Notes 7A

Meaning II: Entailments

☞ Goal: We established in earlier lectures that to know the meaning of a sentence is at least to know its truth
conditions. From the truth conditions of a sentence a speaker can determine some logical relations between that
sentence and other sentences. In the following we concentrate on the relation of entailment. We say that a
sentence p entails a sentence q just in case each conceivable situation in which p is true is a situation in which q is
also true (though the converse need not be the case, i.e. it does not have to be the case that every conceivable
situation in which q is true is a situation in which p is also true). To determine whether a sentence p entails a
sentence q, it is easiest to check whether the following holds: In every conceivable situation in which it is true
that p, it is true that q. For instance, John and Mary are happy entails that John is happy, because the following is
true: In every conceivable situation in which it is true that John and Mary are happy, it is true that John is happy.
While the notion of entailment appears to be exceedingly simple, it has some surprisingly rich linguistic
consequences. Consider the sentence John did not eat. If we replace the VP eat with one which is more
restrictive, such as both eat and drink, we obtain another sentence, John did not both eat and drink, which is
entailed by the first one (since in every conceivable situation in which it is true that John did not eat, it is also true
that John did not both eat and drink.) The point is more general: in any sentence of the form John did not VP1,
we can replace VP1 with a more restrictive verb phrase, VP2, and obtain a new sentence that is entailed by the first
one. We say that John did not VP1 is downward-entailing with respect to its VP position ('downward', because the
entailment holds whenever VP1 is replaced with a verb phrase VP2 that applies to a subset of the things that VP1
applies to). The notion of downward-entailment happens to provide the key to a difficult linguist problem: the
characterization of the environments in which words like any or at all can appear. *John ate at all is
ungrammatical; by contrast, John did not eat at all is fine. Because they want to be associated with a negative
word, words like at all have been called 'Negative Polarity Items'. But it is no trivial task to characterize their
distribution. A syntactic account, based on the notion of 'to be contained within a sister of __', can derive some
interesting results. But a better account is obtained by giving a semantic analysis: Negative Polarity Items are
grammatical only in downward-entailing environments.

1 Entailment

1.1 The Definition of Entailment

A speaker who understands the meaning of a sentence S understands its truth conditions. This allows him to
make further judgments about the relation of S to other sentences. For instance, any speaker will know that John
or Mary came to the party is true in exactly the same situations as Mary or John came to the party. We say for
this reason that these two sentences are equivalent. A weaker notion is that of entailment. A sentence p entails a
sentence q just in case each conceivable situation in which p is true is a situation in which q is also true (though
the converse need not be true1). For instance, each situation in which John and Mary are happy is also a situation

1
If it is the case both that: (a) p entails q, and (b) q entails p, then p and q are true in exactly the same situations, and are thus equivalent.
In other words, equivalence is entailment 'in both directions'.
P. Schlenker - Ling 1 - Introduction to the Study of Language UCLA, Winter 2006 2

in which John is happy (but the converse is not true - there certainly are imaginable situations in which John is
happy but Mary isn't.) To determine whether a sentence p entails a sentence q, it is easiest to check whether the
following holds:

(1) In every conceivable situation in which it is true that p, it is true that q.

Notation: We write: p => q to abbreviate: p entails q. We write: p ≠> q for: p does not entail q.

Examples

(2) a. No student came to class => No student came to class and had a good time
b. No student is over 30 years of age => No student is over 35 years of age
c. Less than five students came to class => Less than five students came to class and were happy
d. Less than five students are over 30 years of age => Less than five students are over 35 years of age

(3) a. Every student came to class ≠> Every student came to class and had a good time
b. Every student is over 30 years of age ≠> Every student is over 35 years of age
c. More than five students came to class ≠> More than five students came to class and were happy
d. More than five students are over 30 years of age ≠> More than five students are over 35 years of age

(4) a. Every student came to class early => Every student came to class
b. More than five students are over 35 years of age => More than five students are over 30 years of age
c. No student came to class early ≠> No student came to class
d. Less than five students are over 35 years of age ≠> Less than five students are over 30 years of age

Some further terminology can be useful. A sentence which is true no matter what, i.e. in every conceivable
situation, is called a tautology (example: It is raining or it is not raining). A sentence which is false no matter
what is called a contradiction (example: It is raining and it is not raining). We note for future reference that when
a sentence is followed by the negation of a sentence it entails, a contradiction is obtained. Example: John
came to class and had a good time and John didn't come to class is contradictory (John came to class and had a
good time entails John came to class; hence John came to class and had a good time and John didn't come to
class to class is a contradiction).

Note. If a sentence p entails a sentence q, p is more informative than q (because if you know that you are in a
situation in which p is true, you know immediately that you are also in a situation in which q is true).
P. Schlenker - Ling 1 - Introduction to the Study of Language UCLA, Winter 2006 3

1.2 Entailingness

We can extract certain systematic patterns from the above examples:

(i) Whenever No student VP1 is true, No student VP2 is true if VP2 is 'more restrictive than VP1' (i.e. applies to a
subset of the things to which VP1 applies). For this reason we say that the sentence No student VP1 is downward-
entailing with respect to its VP position.

(ii) Whenever Every student VP1 is true, Every student VP2 is true if VP2 is 'less restrictive than VP1' (i.e. applies
to a superset of the things to which VP1 applies). For this reason we say that the sentence Every student VP1 is
upward-entailing with respect to its VP position.

It is then enough to observe that Less than five students VP1 is also downward-entailing in its VP position to
immediately obtain the patterns (2)c-d. And similarly the pattern in (4)b can be obtained as soon as it is observed
that More than five students VP1 is upward-entailing in its VP position

Important Note 1: Negation creates a downward-entailing environment:

(5) a. John will not come to class => John will not both come to class and have a good time
b. I am not over 20 years of age => I am not over 30 years of age.

Important Note 2: Not all sentences are upward-entailing or downward-entailing with respect to their VP. Some
are neither. For instance, Exactly five students came to class neither entails that Exactly five students came to
class and had a good time, nor that Exactly five students came to class or had a good time.

2 The Puzzle of Negative Polarity Items I: Syntactic Solution

2.1 The Puzzle

Words such as at all, ever, any are subject to certain surprising constraints, illustrated below. Because they
somehow want to be associated with a negative word (e.g. not and never in (6)), they are called Negative Polarity
Items. As it turns out, the correct characterization of this constraint will have to do with the notion of entailment.
But before we come to that conclusion, we will explore an alternative, highly plausible account, which is
syntactic nature.

(6) a. Lucy will not like Snoopy at all

b. Lucy will never in a million years like Snoopy at all
c. *Lucy will like Snoopy at all
d. *Lucy will definitely like Snoopy at all
e. *Lucy will probably like Snoopy at all
(7) a. No one will like Snoopy at all
b. Nobody will like Snoopy at all
c. *Someone will like Snoopy at all
d. *Somebody will like Snoopy at all
P. Schlenker - Ling 1 - Introduction to the Study of Language UCLA, Winter 2006 4

2.2 A Syntactic Solution ?

We explore several syntactic solutions in turn.

Hypothesis 1: If a negative polarity item appears in a sentence, this sentence must also contain a negative
element.
(8) a. Lucy will not like Snoopy at all
b. *Charlie will believe at all that Lucy will not like Snoopy
c. Nobody will believe that Lucy likes Snoopy at all
d. *Charlie will believe at all that nobody likes Snoopy

Hypothesis 1 makes the correct predictions for (6) and (7) and (8)a, c, but not for (8)b, d.

Hypothesis 2: If a negative polarity item appears in a sentence, this sentence must also contain a negative
element in a position preceding the NPI.

Hypothesis 2 makes the correct predictions for (6), (7) and (8), but not for (9).
(9) *People who do not think like Snoopy at all

Hypothesis 3: A sentence containing an NPI is grammatical only if the NPI is contained within the sister of a
negative element (if the condition is checked on constituency trees, nothing additional needs to be specified; if it
is checked on Phrase Structure trees, one must specify that a node which has a single daughter is negative if its
daughter is).

Hypothesis 3 correctly accounts for all the contrasts above, for instance for that between Lucy will not like Snoopy
at all and *People who do not think likes Snoopy at all (in the latter note that not is too embedded to have as its
sister a node that contains at all; the crucial observation is that people who do not think is a constituent, as shown
by the fact that these words can be replaced as a unity with the pronoun they. This is represented in (11)).
(10)

Lucy

will

not

at all

like Snoopy
P. Schlenker - Ling 1 - Introduction to the Study of Language UCLA, Winter 2006 5

(11)

will

People who do not think

at all

like Snoopy

3 The Puzzle of Negative Polarity Items II: Semantic Solution

Hypothesis 3 makes incorrect predictions for (12)b, unless it is stipulated that 'less than five students' is a
negative word.
(12) a. No student likes Snoopy at all
b. Less than five students like Snoopy at all
c. *Every student likes Snoopy at all
d. *Some student likes Snoopy at all
e. *More than five students like Snoopy at all
Furthermore, it is highly unclear what negative word could account for the following contrast:

(13) a. *Every student will like Snoopy at all

b. Every student who likes Snoopy at all will enjoy this example.
However we notice that the sentences that allow at all in (12) are precisely those that are downward-entailing in
the sense of Section 1. This leads us to:

Hypothesis 4. Negative Polarity Items are grammatical only in Downward-entailing environments.

It can be checked that this gives the right results for all the preceding examples, including (13). For the latter the
key point is that:

(i) Every student will like Snoopy does not entail Every student will like both Snoopy and Lucy (since like Snoopy
and Lucy is a more restrictive VP than like Snoopy, this shows that the sentence is not downward-entailing in its
main VP position).
P. Schlenker - Ling 1 - Introduction to the Study of Language UCLA, Winter 2006 6

(ii) Every student who likes Snoopy will enjoy this example does entail Every student who likes Snoopy and Lucy
will enjoy this example. This shows that with respect to the position in which likes Snoopy is found in this
example, the sentence is downward-entailing. This correctly predicts that when likes Snoopy is replaced with likes
Snoopy at all, the sentence should remain grammatical. This is indeed the case.

4 What do children know about Entailment and Negative Polarity Items?

Experiments performed by and S. Crain and colleagues suggest that:

(i) Young children appear to know constraints on negative polarity items

4 and 5-year-old children appear to know that negative polarity items occur in downward-entailing environments.
An experiment designed to show this was performed by O'Leary & Crain (1994), which is reported below in a
short survey article by Crain on the acquisition of semantics (available online at:
http://cognet.mit.edu/MITECS/Entry/crain)

"One experimenter acted out stories with toys and props; a second experimenter manipulated a puppet, Kermit the
Frog. Following each story, Kermit told the child what he thought happened in the story. The child's task was to
decide whether or not Kermit "said the right thing" and, if not, to explain "what really happened."" Crain gives
(elsewhere) the following examples:

(14) Kermit: “Every dog has some food”

Child: “No, this dog doesn't have any food.”
(15) Kermit: “Only two dogs got any food”
Child: “No, every dog got some food.”
Unattested, i.e. not found in the children's utterances: *No, every dog got any food.
Thus when they corrected Kermit the children:
(a) used some negative polarity items in some downward-entailing environments, as in (14);
(b) did not use negative polarity items in non-downward-entailing environments, as in (15).

(ii) Further experiments [discussed in class but not reported here] also suggest that young children do
understand the entailment properties of some downward-entailing environments. [For more information, see
S. Crain et al. in 'Children's Command of Negation', Proceedings of the Third Tokyo Conference on
Psycholinguistics, 2002, available online at www.ling.umd.edu/crain/papers/TCP2002.pdf]