Presupposition

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In the branch of linguistics known as pragmatics, a presupposition (or PSP) is an implicit assumption about the world or background belief relating to an utterance whose truth is taken for granted in discourse. Examples of presuppositions include:

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A presupposition must be mutually known or assumed by the speaker and addressee for the utterance to be considered appropriate in context. It will generally remain a necessary assumption whether the utterance is placed in the form of an assertion, denial, or question, and can be associated with a specific lexical item or grammatical feature (presupposition trigger) in the utterance.

Crucially, negation of an expression does not change its presuppositions: I want to do it again and I don't want to do it again both presuppose that the subject has done it already one or more times; My wife is pregnant and My wife is not pregnant both presuppose that the subject has a wife. In this respect, presupposition is distinguished from entailment and implicature. For example, The president was assassinated entails that The president is dead, but if the expression is negated, the entailment is not necessarily true.

Negation of a sentence containing a presupposition

If presuppositions of a sentence are not consistent with the actual state of affairs, then one of two approaches can be taken. Given the sentences My wife is pregnant and My wife is not pregnant when one has no wife, then either:

  1. Both the sentence and its negation are false; or
  2. Strawson's approach: Both "my wife is pregnant" and "my wife is not pregnant" use a wrong presupposition (i.e. that there exists a referent which can be described with the noun phrase my wife) and therefore can not be assigned truth values.

Bertrand Russell tries to solve this dilemma with two interpretations of the negated sentence:

  1. "There exists exactly one person, who is my wife and who is not pregnant"
  2. "There does not exist exactly one person, who is my wife and who is pregnant."

For the first phrase, Russell would claim that it is false, whereas the second would be true according to him.

Projection of presuppositions

A presupposition of a part of an utterance is sometimes also a presupposition of the whole utterance, and sometimes not. For instance, the phrase my wife triggers the presupposition that I have a wife. The first sentence below carries that presupposition, even though the phrase occurs inside an embedded clause. In the second sentence, however, it does not. John might be mistaken about his belief that I have a wife, or he might be deliberately trying to misinform his audience, and this has an effect on the meaning of the second sentence, but, perhaps surprisingly, not on the first one.

  1. John thinks that my wife is beautiful.
  2. John said that my wife is beautiful.

Thus, this seems to be a property of the main verbs of the sentences, think and say, respectively. After work by Lauri Karttunen, [1] [2] verbs that allow presuppositions to "pass up" to the whole sentence ("project") are called holes, and verbs that block such passing up, or projection of presuppositions are called plugs. Some linguistic environments are intermediate between plugs and holes: They block some presuppositions and allow others to project. These are called filters. An example of such an environment are indicative conditionals ("If-then" clauses). A conditional sentence contains an antecedent and a consequent. The antecedent is the part preceded by the word "if," and the consequent is the part that is (or could be) preceded by "then." If the consequent contains a presupposition trigger, and the triggered presupposition is explicitly stated in the antecedent of the conditional, then the presupposition is blocked. Otherwise, it is allowed to project up to the entire conditional. Here is an example:

If I have a wife, then my wife is blonde.

Here, the presupposition (that I have a wife) triggered by the expression my wife is blocked, because it is stated in the antecedent of the conditional: That sentence doesn't imply that I have a wife. In the following example, it is not stated in the antecedent, so it is allowed to project, i.e. the sentence does imply that I have a wife.

If it's already 4am, then my wife is probably angry.

Hence, conditional sentences act as filters for presuppositions that are triggered by expressions in their consequent.

A significant amount of current work in semantics and pragmatics is devoted to a proper understanding of when and how presuppositions project.

Presupposition triggers

A presupposition trigger is a lexical item or linguistic construction which is responsible for the presupposition, and thus "triggers" it. [3] The following is a selection of presuppositional triggers following Stephen C. Levinson's classic textbook on Pragmatics, which in turn draws on a list produced by Lauri Karttunen. As is customary, the presuppositional triggers themselves are italicized, and the symbol » stands for 'presupposes'. [4]

Definite descriptions

Definite descriptions are phrases of the form "the X" where X represents a noun phrase. The description is said to be proper when the phrase applies to exactly one object, and conversely, it is said to be improper when either there exist more than one potential referents, as in "the senator from Ohio", or none at all, as in "the king of France". In conventional speech, definite descriptions are implicitly assumed to be proper, hence such phrases trigger the presupposition that the referent is unique and existent.

Factive verbs

In Western epistemology, there is a tradition originating with Plato of defining knowledge as justified true belief. On this definition, for someone to know X, it is required that X be true. A linguistic question thus arises regarding the usage of such phrases: does a person who states "John knows X" implicitly claim the truth of X? Steven Pinker explored this question in a popular science format in a 2007 book on language and cognition, using a widely publicized example from a speech by a U.S. president. [5] A 2003 speech by George W. Bush included the line, "British Intelligence has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." [6] Over the next few years, it became apparent that this intelligence lead was incorrect. But the way the speech was phrased, using a factive verb, implicitly framed the lead as truth rather than hypothesis. There is however a strong alternative view that factivity thesis, the proposition that relational predicates having to do with knowledge, such as knows, learn, remembers, and realized, presuppose the factual truth of their object, is incorrect. [7]

Some further factive predicates: know; be sorry that; be proud that; be indifferent that; be glad that; be sad that.

Implicative verbs

Some further implicative predicates: X happened to V»X didn't plan or intend to V; X avoided Ving»X was expected to, or usually did, or ought to V, etc.

Change of state or continuation of state verbs

With these presupposition triggers, the current unfolding situation is considered presupposed information. [8]

Some further change of state verbs: start; finish; carry on; cease; take (as in X took Y from Z » Y was at/in/with Z); leave; enter; come; go; arrive; etc.

Iteratives

These types of triggers presuppose the existence of a previous state of affairs. [8]

Further iteratives: another time; to come back; restore; repeat; for the nth time.

Temporal clauses

The situation explained in a clause that begins with a temporal clause constructor is typically considered backgrounded information. [8]

Further temporal clause constructors: after; during; whenever; as (as in As John was getting up, he slipped).

Cleft sentences

Cleft sentence structures highlight particular aspects of a sentence and consider the surrounding information to be backgrounded knowledge. These sentences are typically not spoken to strangers, but rather to addressees who are aware of the ongoing situation. [8]

Comparisons and contrasts

Comparisons and contrasts may be marked by stress (or by other prosodic means), by particles like "too", or by comparatives constructions.

Counterfactual conditionals

Questions

Questions often presuppose what the assertive part of the question presupposes, but interrogative parts might introduce further presuppositions. There are three different types of questions: yes/no questions, alternative questions and WH-questions.

Possessive case

Accommodation of presuppositions

A presupposition of a sentence must normally be part of the common ground of the utterance context (the shared knowledge of the interlocutors) in order for the sentence to be felicitous. Sometimes, however, sentences may carry presuppositions that are not part of the common ground and nevertheless be felicitous. For example, I can, upon being introduced to someone, out of the blue explain that my wife is a dentist, this without my addressee having ever heard, or having any reason to believe that I have a wife. In order to be able to interpret my utterance, the addressee must assume that I have a wife. This process of an addressee assuming that a presupposition is true, even in the absence of explicit information that it is, is usually called presupposition accommodation. We have just seen that presupposition triggers like my wife (definite descriptions) allow for such accommodation. In "Presupposition and Anaphora: Remarks on the Formulation of the Projection Problem", [9] the philosopher Saul Kripke noted that some presupposition triggers do not seem to permit such accommodation. An example of that is the presupposition trigger too. This word triggers the presupposition that, roughly, something parallel to what is stated has happened. For example, if pronounced with emphasis on John, the following sentence triggers the presupposition that somebody other than John had dinner in New York last night.

John had dinner in New York last night, too.

But that presupposition, as stated, is completely trivial, given what we know about New York. Several million people had dinner in New York last night, and that in itself doesn't satisfy the presupposition of the sentence. What is needed for the sentence to be felicitous is really that somebody relevant to the interlocutors had dinner in New York last night, and that this has been mentioned in the previous discourse, or that this information can be recovered from it. Presupposition triggers that disallow accommodation are called anaphoric presupposition triggers.

Presupposition in critical discourse analysis

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a broad study belonging to not one research category. It focuses on identifying presuppositions of an abstract nature from varying perspectives. CDA is considered critical, not only in the sense of being analytical, but also in the ideological sense. [10] Through the analysis of written texts and verbal speech, Teun A. van Dijk (2003) says CDA studies power imbalances existing in both the conversational and political spectrum. [10] With the purpose of first identifying and then tackling inequality in society, van Dijk describes CDA as a nonconformist piece of work. [10] One notable feature of ideological presuppositions researched in CDA is a concept termed synthetic personalisation [11]

Logical construct

To describe a presupposition in the context of propositional calculus and truth-bearers, Belnap defines "A sentence is a presupposition of a question if the truth of the sentence is a necessary condition of the question's having some true answer." Then referring to the semantic theory of truth, interpretations are used to formulate a presupposition: "Every interpretation which makes the question truly answerable is an interpretation which makes the presupposed sentence true as well."

A sentence that expresses a presupposition in a question may be characterized as follows: the question has some true answer if and only if the sentence is true. [12]

See also

Related Research Articles

A quotation is the repetition of a sentence, phrase, or passage from speech or text that someone has said or written. In oral speech, it is the representation of an utterance that is introduced by a quotative marker, such as a verb of saying. For example: John said: "I saw Mary today". Quotations in oral speech are also signaled by special prosody in addition to quotative markers. In written text, quotations are signaled by quotation marks. Quotations are also used to present well-known statement parts that are explicitly attributed by citation to their original source; such statements are marked with quotation marks.

In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the interpreted. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. The field has been represented since 1986 by the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deixis</span> Words requiring context to understand their meaning

In linguistics, deixis is the use of general words and phrases to refer to a specific time, place, or person in context, e.g., the words tomorrow, there, and they. Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their denoted meaning varies depending on time and/or place. Words or phrases that require contextual information to be fully understood—for example, English pronouns—are deictic. Deixis is closely related to anaphora. Although this article deals primarily with deixis in spoken language, the concept is sometimes applied to written language, gestures, and communication media as well. In linguistic anthropology, deixis is treated as a particular subclass of the more general semiotic phenomenon of indexicality, a sign "pointing to" some aspect of its context of occurrence.

An interjection is a word or expression that occurs as an utterance on its own and expresses a spontaneous feeling or reaction. It is a diverse category, encompassing many different parts of speech, such as exclamations (ouch!, wow!), curses (damn!), greetings, response particles, hesitation markers, and other words. Due to its diverse nature, the category of interjections partly overlaps with a few other categories like profanities, discourse markers, and fillers. The use and linguistic discussion of interjections can be traced historically through the Greek and Latin Modistae over many centuries.

In pragmatics, a subdiscipline of linguistics, an implicature is something the speaker suggests or implies with an utterance, even though it is not literally expressed. Implicatures can aid in communicating more efficiently than by explicitly saying everything we want to communicate. The philosopher H. P. Grice coined the term in 1975. Grice distinguished conversational implicatures, which arise because speakers are expected to respect general rules of conversation, and conventional ones, which are tied to certain words such as "but" or "therefore". Take for example the following exchange:

Linguistic entailments are entailments which arise in natural language. If a sentence A entails a sentence B, sentence A cannot be true without B being true as well. For instance, the English sentence "Pat is a fluffy cat" entails the sentence "Pat is a cat" since one cannot be a fluffy cat without being a cat. On the other hand, this sentence does not entail "Pat chases mice" since it is possible for a cat to not chase mice.

Counterfactual conditionals are conditional sentences which discuss what would have been true under different circumstances, e.g. "If Peter believed in ghosts, he would be afraid to be here." Counterfactuals are contrasted with indicatives, which are generally restricted to discussing open possibilities. Counterfactuals are characterized grammatically by their use of fake tense morphology, which some languages use in combination with other kinds of morphology including aspect and mood.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Question</span> Request for information

A question is an utterance which serves as a request for information. Questions are sometimes distinguished from interrogatives, which are the grammatical forms typically used to express them. Rhetorical questions, for instance, are interrogative in form but may not be considered bona fide questions, as they are not expected to be answered.

Conditional sentences are natural language sentences that express that one thing is contingent on something else, e.g. "If it rains, the picnic will be cancelled." They are so called because the impact of the main clause of the sentence is conditional on the dependent clause. A full conditional thus contains two clauses: a dependent clause called the antecedent, which expresses the condition, and a main clause called the consequent expressing the result.

Universal pragmatics (UP), more recently placed under the heading of formal pragmatics, is the philosophical study of the necessary conditions for reaching an understanding through communication. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas coined the term in his essay "What is Universal Pragmatics?" where he suggests that human competition, conflict, and strategic action are attempts to achieve understanding that have failed because of modal confusions. The implication is that coming to terms with how people understand or misunderstand one another could lead to a reduction of social conflict.

The concept of illocutionary acts was introduced into linguistics by the philosopher J. L. Austin in his investigation of the various aspects of speech acts. In his framework, locution is what was said and meant, illocution is what was done, and perlocution is what happened as a result.

In linguistics, anaphora is the use of an expression whose interpretation depends upon another expression in context. In a narrower sense, anaphora is the use of an expression that depends specifically upon an antecedent expression and thus is contrasted with cataphora, which is the use of an expression that depends upon a postcedent expression. The anaphoric (referring) term is called an anaphor. For example, in the sentence Sally arrived, but nobody saw her, the pronoun her is an anaphor, referring back to the antecedent Sally. In the sentence Before her arrival, nobody saw Sally, the pronoun her refers forward to the postcedent Sally, so her is now a cataphor. Usually, an anaphoric expression is a pro-form or some other kind of deictic expression. Both anaphora and cataphora are species of endophora, referring to something mentioned elsewhere in a dialog or text.

In linguistics, focus is a grammatical category that conveys which part of the sentence contributes new, non-derivable, or contrastive information. In the English sentence "Mary only insulted BILL", focus is expressed prosodically by a pitch accent on "Bill" which identifies him as the only person Mary insulted. By contrast, in the sentence "Mary only INSULTED Bill", the verb "insult" is focused and thus expresses that Mary performed no other actions towards Bill. Focus is a cross-linguistic phenomenon and a major topic in linguistics. Research on focus spans numerous subfields including phonetics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics.

In formal linguistics, discourse representation theory (DRT) is a framework for exploring meaning under a formal semantics approach. One of the main differences between DRT-style approaches and traditional Montagovian approaches is that DRT includes a level of abstract mental representations within its formalism, which gives it an intrinsic ability to handle meaning across sentence boundaries. DRT was created by Hans Kamp in 1981. A very similar theory was developed independently by Irene Heim in 1982, under the name of File Change Semantics (FCS). Discourse representation theories have been used to implement semantic parsers and natural language understanding systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Relevance theory</span> Theory of cognitive linguistics

Relevance theory is a framework for understanding the interpretation of utterances. It was first proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, and is used within cognitive linguistics and pragmatics. The theory was originally inspired by the work of Paul Grice and developed out of his ideas, but has since become a pragmatic framework in its own right. The seminal book, Relevance, was first published in 1986 and revised in 1995.

In semantics, donkey sentences are sentences that contain a pronoun with clear meaning but whose syntactic role in the sentence poses challenges to linguists. Such sentences defy straightforward attempts to generate their formal language equivalents. The difficulty is with understanding how English speakers parse such sentences.

In linguistics, information structure, also called information packaging, describes the way in which information is formally packaged within a sentence. This generally includes only those aspects of information that "respond to the temporary state of the addressee's mind", and excludes other aspects of linguistic information such as references to background (encyclopedic/common) knowledge, choice of style, politeness, and so forth. For example, the difference between an active clause and a corresponding passive is a syntactic difference, but one motivated by information structuring considerations. Other structures motivated by information structure include preposing and inversion.

Logophoricity is a phenomenon of binding relation that may employ a morphologically different set of anaphoric forms, in the context where the referent is an entity whose speech, thoughts, or feelings are being reported. This entity may or may not be distant from the discourse, but the referent must reside in a clause external to the one in which the logophor resides. The specially-formed anaphors that are morphologically distinct from the typical pronouns of a language are known as logophoric pronouns, originally coined by the linguist Claude Hagège. The linguistic importance of logophoricity is its capability to do away with ambiguity as to who is being referred to. A crucial element of logophoricity is the logophoric context, defined as the environment where use of logophoric pronouns is possible. Several syntactic and semantic accounts have been suggested. While some languages may not be purely logophoric, logophoric context may still be found in those languages; in those cases, it is common to find that in the place where logophoric pronouns would typically occur, non-clause-bounded reflexive pronouns appear instead.

In linguistics, givenness is a phenomenon in which a speaker assumes that contextual information of a topic of discourse is already known to the listener. The speaker thus considers it unnecessary to supply further contextual information through an expression's linguistic properties, its syntactic form or position, or its patterns of stress and intonation. Givenness involves contextual information in a discourse that is given, or assumed to be known, by the addressee in the moment of utterance. Therefore, a given expression must be known from prior discourse.

In linguistics, a rising declarative is an utterance which has the syntactic form of a declarative but the rising intonation typically associated with polar interrogatives.

  1. Rising declarative: Justin Bieber wants to hang out with me?
  2. Falling declarative: Justin Bieber wants to hang out with me.
  3. Polar question: Does Justin Bieber want to hang out with me?

References

  1. ↑ Karttunen, Lauri (1974). "Presupposition and Linguistic Context". Theoretical Linguistics. 1 (1–3). doi:10.1515/thli.1974.1.1-3.181. ISSN   0301-4428. Archived from the original on 2023-05-21. Retrieved 2023-05-21.
  2. ↑ Pragmatics: A Reader, Steven Davis (ed.), pages 406-415, Oxford University Press, 1991.
  3. ↑ Kadmon, Nirit. Formal pragmatics: semantics, pragmatics, presupposition, and focus. Great Britain: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001, page 10.
  4. ↑ Levinson, Stephen C. Pragmatics.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 181-184.
  5. ↑ Pinker, Steven (2007), The stuff of thought: language as a window into human nature , Penguin Books, ISBN   978-0-670-06327-7, pp. 6–9.{{citation}}: External link in |postscript= (help)CS1 maint: postscript (link)
  6. ↑ Bush, George W., State of the Union Address, January 28th, 2003.
  7. ↑ Hazlett, A. (2010). "The Myth of Factive Verbs". Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 80 (3): 497–522. doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2010.00338.x.
  8. 1 2 3 4 Sedivy, Julie, and Carlson, Greg N. (2011). "Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You and What This Says About You," Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 104-105.
  9. ↑ Kripke, Saul (2009) "Presupposition and Anaphora: Remarks on the Formulation of the Projection Problem," Linguistic Inquiry, Vol. 40, No. 3, Pages 367-386.
  10. 1 2 3 "Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context. With such dissident research, critical discourse analysts take explicit position, and thus want to understand, expose, and ultimately resist social inequality."
    Teun Adrianus van Dijk, "Critical Discourse Analysis Archived 2009-02-06 at the Wayback Machine ", chapter 18 in Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen and Heidi E. Hamilton (eds.), The Handbook of Discourse Analysis , (Wiley-Blackwell, 2003): pp. 352–371.
  11. ↑ "Synthetic personalisation", Wikipedia, 2017-07-29, retrieved 2020-05-15
  12. ↑ Nuel D. Belnap, Jr. (1966) "Questions, Answers, and Presuppositions", The Journal of Philosophy 63(20): 609–11, American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Sixty-Third Annual Meeting. doi : 10.2307/2024255

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