An Analysis of the Usage and Effect of Presupposition and Entailment in Isaac Marion's Novel 'Warm Bodies'

Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 3,0, University of Würzburg (Universität), course: Semantics, language: English, abstract: This paper is going to deal with the usage and effects of 'presupposition' and 'entailment' with regard to the emergence of these semantic theories in Isaac Marion's novel Warm Bodies. For this purpose, the following will be subdivided into two main parts. The first one will be an introductory part in which every tool and term that is to be used will be spelled out. The first chapter is going to deal with 'truth values' and 'truth conditions'. The terms 'truth condition' and 'truth value', as well as the meaning of 'priori' and 'posteriori' truth are going to be pointed out in order to show the relations of the theory of 'truth' with the ones of 'entailment' and 'presupposition'. The second chapter is going to analyze 'presuppositions' and its main ideas. For this purpose, the chapter is going to begin with a proper definition of this theory. It is to be pointed out what 'presuppositions' are, how they are used and how the many possible 'presuppositions' can be distinguished from one another in general by their triggers. In order to do so, this is going to be followed by an explanatory part about 'presupposition triggers', including which these triggers are and how they are used, as well as some examples. The third chapter is going to examine the semantic theory of 'entailment' and its main ideas. At first, it will be pointed out what 'entailment' means by using a truth-based definition by John I. Saeed. In order to explain how this semantic theory works, this paragraph will also include some examples, as well as a short excurse to 'hyponymy', since this is a regular source for entailment between sentences. Furthermore, the so called 'truth table' will be introduced in order to improve the accessibility of the theory by visualizing it. The second part is going to be the analysis of some selected passages of Isaac Marion's novel Warm Bodies in terms of the above named aspects, in which the usage and effect of presupposition and entailment in this context will be pointed out.