Qualitative Study on Semantic Entailment, Implicature and Pre-Supposition among Speakers of English: A Review of Donald Davison's Truth-Conditional Semantics Theory

This paper takes a cursory look at what constitutes entailment in semantics. It discusses the sources of inclusion and attempts to distinguish between entailment and other similar terms, such as implicature and pre-supposition, with which it is sometimes confused. The constant confusion between the implicature, pre-supposition and entailment among speakers of English has prompted the researcher into investigating the three items using the Donald Davison's truth-conditional semantics theory. It was found that differences exist between them. Finally, the importance of entailment to the English speaker was not left out.