My Notes for Pragmatics Huang Y. 2007 Ch. 3

Ch. 3 Presupposition

Presupposition is another pragmatic topic that originates within the tradition of the philosophy of language. 

Gottlob Frege: the first scholar in modern times who (re)introduced the philosophical study of presupposition(the notion of presupposition-- the medieval philosopher Pertus Hispanus)

In the philosophy of language, the study of presupposition has largely been confined to debates about the nature of reference a d referring expressions.

In linguistics, on the other hand, the investigation of presupposition is concerned with a much wider range of phenomena, centering around the general debates about the interaction and division of labour between semantics and pragmatics.

3.1 What is presupposition?

• Presupposition can be informally defined as an inference or proposition whose truth is taken for granted in the utterance of a sentence. Its main function is to act as a precondition of some sort of the appropriate use of that sentence.
• Presupposition is usually generated by the use of particular lexical items and/or linguistic constructions. Lexical items and linguistic constructions that engender presuppositions are called presupposition triggers.

3.2 Properties of presupposition

Presupposition exhibit a number of distinctive properties, notably: constancy under negation and defeasibility/cancellability.

• Constancy under negation
  By constancy under negation is meant that a presupposition generated by the use of a lexical item or a syntactic structure remains the same when the sentence containing that lexical item or syntactic structure is negated.
  
  An utterance of a sentence S presupposes a proposition p if and only if:
  a. if S is true, then p is true
  b. if S is false, then p is still true
  
  Problems:
  Constancy under negation may not necessary.(e.g. there is a class of sentences which are hard if not impossible to negate, yet they bear presuppositions)
  Constancy under negation may not be sufficient.
• Defeasibility
  Like conversational implicatures, but unlike semantic entailments, presuppositions are cancellable. They are nullified if they are inconsistent with background assumptions, conversational implicatures, and certain discourse contexts.
• The projection problem
  The projection problem manifest itself in two opposite directions. On the one side of the projection coin, the presuppositions of a component sentence may fail to be projected on to, and hence inherited by, the whole complex sentence. On the other side, the presuppositions of a component sentence may be preserved when that constituent sentence becomes part of a more complex sentence.

3.3 Analyses

• The filtering-satisfaction analysis
• The cancellation analysis
• The accommodation analysis

Summary

Presupposition may not be a single phenomenon with a unitary explanation, but rather a domain of related issues involving the interaction of several semantic and pragmatic principles.

Entailment: is a relationship that applies between two sentences, where the truth of one implies the truth of the other, because of the meaning of the words involved.(semantic field)

Presuppositions: are inferences about what is assumed to be true in the utterance rather than directly asserted to be true. They are closely linked to the words and grammatical structures in the utterance.(pragmatic field)