He slept, moving on the bed.
It implies that he moved on the bed while he slept.
Every human being has a brain
I used a singular instead of a plural, does this mean it implies all human beings have brains?
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I assume you are looking for the normal meaning of imply, and not a technical term in logic. Is that correct?– James KCommented Dec 5, 2021 at 0:33
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@James K Yes, it is. ‘To express indirectly’– user284747Commented Dec 5, 2021 at 0:34
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1 Answer
This doesn't "imply" that all humans have brains. It states it as a fact. There is no proces of reasoning that the reader needs to go through to understand this fact.
The common use of "imply" is when you can deduce something from a text.
John is married to Sarah, and Sarah's brother is a keen runner.
This implies that John's brother-in-law often goes running. We can work that out from the information given, We can be certain that it is true. We can infer that John's brother-in-law owns a pair of running shoes; this is not given, but common sense suggests it is very likely to be true.
But in your example there is no working out required, so "imply" is not the best word.
(In logic "P implies Q" is just a way of saying "Q or (not P) or both", so "Either all humans have brains, or at least one human does not have a brain, or both." And a little thought makes it clear that that is trivially true, and so "Every human has a brain" implies that "All humans have brains".)
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Then, about the omission of a participial phrase (the first example) it also doesn’t imply that he moved on the bed while he slept? Commented Dec 5, 2021 at 0:53
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The first is frankly weird. It means he slept while he was moving on a bed. You have the participle and the main verb the wrong way round. "He moved on the bed while sleeping" is what you mean.– James KCommented Dec 5, 2021 at 8:28
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I don't agree that John is married to Sarah, and Sarah's brother is a keen runner implies John's brother-in-law often goes running (or "is a keen runner" - I don't suppose that rephrasing is relevant to your point). I think it states it as an absolute fact. Just as Sarah's brother is called Peter, and her husband is called John does more than simply "imply" that John has a brother-in-law called Peter - linguistically speaking, the fact that John has that relationship to a person of that name is entailed, not implied (it's a necessary "concomitant fact"). Commented Dec 5, 2021 at 14:58
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The point of "imply" is that the truth is not directly stated. The listener has to do some working out. In this example the fact that "John's brother in law likes running" requires the listener to do a minimal amount of work: the fact in the two sentences are combined and a piece of general knowledge is applied (that the brother of a spouse is called an "in law"). To my mind, that is the minimal effort needed to justify the word "imply" rather than "state". Feel free to suggest a better example!– James KCommented Dec 5, 2021 at 15:06