meansentails

Meansentails is a term used in linguistics and philosophy of language to describe a relation between the sense of a linguistic expression and a proposition that is entailed by that sense. Concretely, an expression e meansentails a proposition P if, when e is used with its ordinary sense, P must be true given that sense. In this view, the meaning of an expression carries with it certain necessary conditions for its application, and these conditions take the form of propositions that follow from the content of the expression.

Example contrasts help clarify the idea. The sense of the word dog entails that the referent is an animal. The sense of a more specific term like poodle entails that the referent is a dog and, by biological classification, a mammal. Thus, the meaning of these terms guarantees (entails) certain further properties about their referents. Meansentails is thus a way of making precise how meanings provide information beyond the surface assertion of an utterance.

Formalization and related ideas. In possible-world semantics, meansentails can be modeled as a relation between the sense of an expression and a proposition such that, in all worlds where the sense applies, the proposition holds. This notion is distinct from entailment between propositions or sentences, which concerns logical consequence across entire statements rather than the content of a single lexical item or phrase. Meansentails helps bridge lexical semantics and truth-conditional content.

See also semantic entailment, lexical semantics, sense and reference.