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entities and with the assumption that listeners will collaborate and interpret those expressions
as the speaker intended.
The social dimension of reference may also be tied to the effect of collaboration. The
immediate recognition of an intended referent, even when a minimal referring expression (for
example, a pronoun) is used, represents something shared, something in common, and hence
social closeness. Successful reference means that an intention was recognized, via inference,
indicating a kind of shared knowledge and hence social connection. The assump-tion of shared
knowledge is also crucially involved in the study of presupposition.

PRESUPPOSITION AND ENTAILMENT

In the preceding discussion of reference, there was an appeal to the idea that speakers
assume certain information is already known by their listeners. Because it is treated as known,
such information will generally not be stated and consequently will count as part of what is
communicated but not said. The technical terms presupposition and entailment are used to
describe two dif-ferent aspects of this kind of information.
It is worth noting at the outset that presupposition and entail-ment were considered to
be much more central to pragmatics in the past than they are now. In more recent approaches,
there has been less interest in the type of technical discussion associated with the logical
analysis of these phenomena. Without some introduction to that type of analytic discussion,
however, it becomes very difficult to understand how the current relationship between
semantics and pragmatics developed. Much of what fol-lows in this chapter is designed to
illustrate the process of think-ing through a number of problems in the analysis of some
aspects of invisible meaning. Let's begin by defining our terms.
A presupposition is something the speaker assumes to be the case prior to making an
utterance. Speakers, not sentences, have pre-suppositions. An entailment is something that
logically follows from what is asserted in the utterance. Sentences, not speakers, have
entailments.
We can identify some of the potentially assumed information that would be associated with
the utterance of [І].
[І] Mary's brother bought three horses.
In producing the utterance in [І], the speaker will normally be expected to have the
presuppositions that a person called Mary exists and that she has a brother. The speaker may
also hold the more specific presuppositions that Mary has only one brother and that he has a
lot of money. All of these presuppositions are the speaker's and all of them can be wrong, in
fact. The sentence in [І] will be treated as having the entailments that Mary's brother bought
something, bought three animals, bought two horses, bought one horse, and many other
similar logical consequences. These entailments follow from the sentence, regardless of
whether the speaker's beliefs are right or wrong, in fact. They are communicated without being
said. Because of its logical nature, however, entailment is not generally discussed as much in
con-temporary pragmatics as the more speaker-dependent notion of presupposition.

Presupposition
In many discussions of the concept, presupposition is treated as a relationship between
two propositions. If we say that the sentence in [2a.] contains the proposition p and the
sentence in [2b.] contains the proposition q, then, using the symbol » to mean 'presupposes',
we can represent the relationship as in [2c.].