Presupposition

7 Key excerpts on "Presupposition"

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  The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies and Linguistics

  • Kirsten Malmkjaer, Kirsten Malmkjaer(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  To generalise, the semantic approach to Presupposition is mainly concerned with logical relations between sentences, and the pragmatic approach to Presupposition takes into account contextual factors. The difference between semantic and pragmatic approaches is related to the fundamental division between semantics and pragmatics. There are two major contrasts between the two fields: first, semantics is more concerned with the conventional meaning of language, while pragmatics pays more attention to language use or conversational implicatures; second, semantics focuses on the content of text, particularly truth conditions, while pragmatics considers the context, such as attitudes or interests of participants (Stalnaker 1998b, 28). These differences have led to different approaches to the study of Presupposition, and although the two approaches are sometimes opposed, Presupposition is both semantic and pragmatic in nature. Language use implies belief on the speaker’s part in the existence of referents, which is mainly a semantic issue; meanwhile, sentences are instruments used intentionally by participants who have beliefs and attitudes, which are mainly pragmatic issues (Green 1996, 112–113). As Sandt (1988, 26) expresses it, “a semantic Presupposition of a sentence is a pragmatic Presupposition of the users of the sentence”. In other words, a semantic Presupposition of a proposition will be a pragmatic Presupposition of the people in that context (Segerdahl 1996, 189). Actually, “[n]o text of any kind would be comprehensible without considerable shared context and background” (Tannen 2007, 37). Context is also essential for understanding Presuppositions in Translation Studies. More discussion in this regard will be provided in the following section.

  Core issues and topics

  The previous section has shown that implicature and Presupposition are closely related concepts. In some approaches, implicatures have been seen as types of Presuppositions, and exploration of Presupposition can provide an expanded perspective on implicature. Both implicature and Presupposition are relevant to translation and interpretation, as both concern the meaning of linguistic expressions and play a role in carrying semantic and pragmatic implications. For this reason, translators and interpreters are more likely to understand the meaning of their source texts and to produce an appropriate target text if they pay attention to implicature and Presupposition when analysing the original text and when presenting the target text. However, while implicature and Presupposition are relevant to translation and interpretation, conveying implicature and Presupposition in translation and interpretation is not straightforward.

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  The Politics of Language

  • David Beaver, Jason Stanley(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  Heim, “On the Projection Problem for Presuppositions”; Karttunen, “Presuppositions and Linguistic Context”; Stalnaker, “Assertion,” “Pragmatic Presuppositions.” 11. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3. It remains contested whether Eubulides is the originator of the paradox of the heap, and no text of his survives. 12. The mixtures of grammars approach can be found, for example, in the work of historical linguist Tony Kroch (e.g., “Reflexes of Grammar in Patterns of Language Change”). Such methods are also common in computational models of language acquisition, with much work using probabilistic context-free grammars (which allow each grammar rule to be associated with a probability). 13. We are far from being the first to see Presupposition as playing a central role in manipulative language. For example, in Sold on Language, Julie Sedivy and Greg Carlson argue that Presupposition is an important device in advertising. 14. Karttunen, “Presuppositions and Linguistic Context.” Karttunen’s model of Presupposition is closely related to Stalnaker’s. Both propose to explain Presuppositional data in terms of the contexts in which utterances occur, and both allow that these contexts will be updated dynamically as conversation proceeds. However, Stalnaker’s model cannot properly be described as an account of Presupposition projection, because the pragmatic model of Presupposition he develops does not assume that Presuppositions are conventionally associated with particular constructions, i.e., Presupposition triggers. If there are no Presupposition triggers, it doesn’t make much sense to ask what happens when Presupposition triggers are embedded

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  Language in Literature

  • Michael Toolan(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  9 Presupposition Presupposition vs. assertion: foreground and background again

  Take this section title, and the way that ‘foreground and background again’ implies that foreground and background have been considered on at least one previous occasion: that is what Presupposition is. It is the label for all the linguistic constructions that prompt us to note some further claim or point, behind those explicitly made in a text.

  In a number of situations in this book, the value of a foreground/background distinction has been emphasized. In narratives, we have seen how the bare and essential event-sequence gets foregrounded by virtue of being expressed, typically, in the simple past tense. Alongside such simple past tense verbs, verbs in present tense, with or without progressive or perfective aspect, are treated as carrying accompanying or background information (often orientational or evaluative). We have also seen, in sentence structure, how whatever comes first in the sentence (which may well not be the subject) is by that means alone foregrounded. Recall how, in Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, suffering itself is foregrounded at the peom’s opening: ‘About suffering they were never wrong, the old masters’. Intonationally, of course, whatever word contains the tonic syllable in a tone group – the syllable with the most striking pitch-change – is foregrounded relative to the surrounding and backgrounded syllables. Narratologically, one might argue that within passages which are predominantly narration, any lexical-sequential level of discourse-construction, those lexical selections which are least predictable and therefore, in a sense, most distinctively informative, are moments of foregrounding (it was suggested that a version of cloze-testing can sometimes sensitize us as to what words are least predictable, therefore most ‘original’ or ‘creative’, and therefore most telling). Thus the foreground-background principle operates at many levels, in literary composition and analysis.

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  The Presupposition and Discourse Functions of the Japanese Particle Mo

  • Sachiko Shudo(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Before leaving this chapter, let us address the issue of what constitutes the accommodation for the mo-Presupposition. The notion of Presupposition has been employed by many linguists to explain inferences that the hearer makes (see Levinson 1983). Among them, Karttunen and Peters (1975) argue that many phenomenon that have been accounted for in terms of the notion of Presupposition should be treated as particularized conversational and conventional implicatures. Their claim is not to negate the notion of Presupposition, but to recognize as implicatures some of what are referred to as Presuppositional behaviors.

  It should be clarified here that I do not use the term ‘Presupposition’ to refer to inference. A Presupposition is not an inference per se but a condition that must be satisfied by the context. However, a condition presupposed by the use of a linguistic form is conveyed as a part of the meaning of the sentence to the hearer. Such conditions that are presupposed by sentences may or may not be satisfied by the context. When the condition is not satisfied by the context, the hearer makes an inference about the condition. I will reserve the term ‘conventional implicature’ for such an inference that the hearer makes in order to accommodate for a Presupposition. Thus, I will distinguish Presupposition from conventional implicature on the basis that the former is a property of the sentence, while the latter is a property of the discourse. When a mo-Presupposition is satisfied by the context, the hearer does not need to make an inference and therefore the Presupposition does not generate conventional implicature since the condition in issue is already part of the hearer’s context. It is only when the mo-Presupposition is not satisfied that the conventionally implicature (which is the same as the mo-Presupposition) is generated so that the context (not the pre-context) satisfies the mo-Presupposition.

  Now let us examine how a mo-Presupposition in the accommodation usage interacts with Grice’s (1975) cooperative principle. Grice claims that conversation participants are expected to observe the following principle:

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  Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose

  • Mick Short(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 8 Assumptions, Presuppositions and the inferring of meaning

  8.1 Introduction

  It appears at first sight that words and sentences possess meaning in some inherent way (everybody knows what 'tree' and 'Oak trees have green leaves' mean). But in addition, to infer appropriate meaning from what is said or written often crucially depends upon applying relevant assumptions about the world (including language itself) to the linguistic 'message'. Pretend, for example that someone says to you 'Go on, then'. If you are playing cards and the other person has had a turn, you will interpret the phrase as meaning that it is your turn to play and that you have not noticed that the other person has already played. If you are a child who has been asking to be allowed to play with your friends outside, the same sentence can be used to give permission, even in a situation where the immediately preceding conversation has not been related to your request.

  Thus the context which we assume when interpreting an utterance can affect its meaning or significance. It is important to remember, however, that in real life these contexts will often be provided by the situations we find ourselves in, and that when we read texts this 'situationality' is prompted by clues from within the text. We have to construct meaning 'behind the words' or 'between the lines', as drama critics often say. But we can't construct anything we like. In the middle of a game of poker, 'Go on then' is very unlikely to be construable as the giving of permission for one of the participants to play with a friend outside. When we read, we are prompted in what we construct not by the situation we are in, but by the text itself, and the situations which that text sets up, as we will see below.

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  Introduction to Pragmatics

  • Betty J. Birner(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  5 Presupposition

  One of the things we noted in the last chapter is that the felicitous use of the definite article in English requires that the referent be familiar or unique or identifiable in some sense, although the particulars of the requirement were found to be very difficult to pin down. Closely related to this requirement is the fact that the use of the definite article seems to suggest an assumption of the existence of the referent; that is, to utter (154a) is to presuppose (154b):

  (154)

  a.  The King of France is wise. b.  There exists a King of France. (Strawson 1950; adapted from Russell 1905)

  One cannot felicitously utter (154a) without both the speaker and the hearer taking for granted that there is a King of France. Once again, then, we find that communication hinges on the mutual assumptions of the interlocutors regarding each other’s belief states.

  You will not be surprised to learn that one of the arguments concerning Presupposition has centered on whether it is a semantic or a pragmatic phenomenon, or both. This time, however, the argument is not based so much on how the fields of semantics and pragmatics are delimited as on how Presupposition itself is defined.

  5.1 Presupposition, Negation, and Entailment

  An early discussion of the problem of Presupposition appears in Frege (1892):

  If anything is asserted there is always an obvious Presupposition that the simple or compound proper names used have a reference. If one therefore asserts ‘Kepler died in misery’, there is a Presupposition that the name ‘Kepler’ designates something.

  (Frege 1892; cited in Levinson 1983: 169)

  In short, to utter an assertion about Kepler is to presuppose that the term Kepler has a referent, that is, to presuppose that Kepler exists (or at least existed, before he died in misery). Nonetheless, this bit of meaning is not conveyed in the same way that “died in misery” is conveyed; at the very least, it’s apparent that the primary purpose of uttering Kepler died in misery would not be to convey that the name Kepler

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  A Companion to Experimental Philosophy

  • Justin Sytsma, Wesley Buckwalter, Justin Sytsma, Wesley Buckwalter(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  6 All of these theorists embrace a less constrained conception of pragmatics in thinking that context of utterance helps determine the proposition that is logically prior to implicatures itself.

  To what extent do pragmatic, contextual factors contribute to the determination of primary propositional content? Contextualists maintain that pragmatic intrusion is widespread. Others deny this. Presented with context shifting arguments – arguments in which the truth conditions of what is said seem to change relative to context – opponents of contextualism adopt one of two strategies. Some maintain that the presumed, pragmatic intrusion is actually traceable to the syntactic or semantic features of the relevant expressions. Others contend that the apparent shifts in truth conditions are actually shifts in what is implicated across contexts. Recently, linguists and psychologists have experimentally investigated these different accounts. As an entrée into this research, I will briefly discuss experimental work on so-called scalar implicatures, before even more briefly looking at figurative language.

  7

  27.2 Context in Primitive Propositions

  Suppose Charlie is in a position to know how many children Darlene has. If we are wondering how many cars we need to transport Charlie and Darlene’s families to the beach, Charlie might say, “Darlene has two kids.” In this context, he would often be understood to primarily convey that Darlene has two kids, and not more than two kids. The sentence itself though, independent of context, seems consistent with Darlene’s having more than two kids. And, indeed, in another context, it might be taken in this way. For example, if the rain god Tlaloc requires only two more child sacrifices, the utterance “Darlene has two kids” might be understood to mean that Darlene has at least two kids

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