CHAPTER 8 PRAGMATICS
B. Type of Pragmatic
6. Presuppositions and Presupposition Trigger
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In the branch of linguistics known as pragmatics, presuppositions are implicit assumptions about the world or background beliefs related to an utterance whose truth is taken for granted in discourse. Examples of suppositions include: Jane is no longer writing fiction. Presumption: Jane once wrote fiction. Prejudice is also used more specifically as a term for certain types of inference that will be described in this section. Inference in this class is interesting here because it is an important way for speakers and writers to provide clues, in the process of making each utterance, what their current assumptions are like.
Presupposition, broadly conceived, is a type of inference associated with utterances of natural-language sentences. Presuppositional inferences are distinguished from other kinds of inferences, especially from at-issue inferences, in that they generally convey backgrounded, uncontroversial information for the context of utterance. For example, an utterance of “John forgot to call Mary” typically has a presuppositional inference that John was supposed to call Mary. It is intuitively clear that this is not the main point the speaker wants to make by the utterance. Rather, the at-issue content is that John didn’t call Mary (although he was supposed to). Typically, the presuppositional inferences of an utterance are already known to be true and accepted by the conversational participants, or, at least, the speaker assumes so when the utterance is made.
One caveat here is that presuppositional inferences may convey new information in some cases, although they are arguably exceptions rather than the rule. This exceptional behavior of presupposition is generally termed
“accommodation” and has been treated as an important topic in the pragmatics of presupposition. Notice that in the pragmatic sense of the term, presuppositions include all sorts of assumptions that the speaker makes in uttering a sentence. In the above example, for example, it is also a presupposition of the utterance that the hearer or hearers understand English.
Along with this pragmatic sense of the term, it is common in the literature to speak of presuppositions as part of the conventional semantic properties of sentences. To explicitly distinguish between these two uses of the term, the former is often called “pragmatic presupposition” and the latter is called
“semantic presupposition.” Pragmatic and semantic presuppositions are closely related, in that an utterance of a sentence that has a semantic
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presupposition is associated with a pragmatic presupposition about the semantic presupposition, while a pragmatic presupposition does not necessarily stem from a semantic presupposition.
Examples:
The utterance John regrets that he stopped doing linguistics before he left Cambridge has the following example for presuppositions:
There is someone uniquely identifiable to speaker and addressee as John.
John stopped doing linguistics before he left Cambridge.
John was doing linguistics before he left Cambridge.
John left Cambridge.
John had been at Cambridge.
Presupposition Trigger
Presupposition has long been used as a property of language to shape the audience’s ideology. Using presupposition triggers, the author or speaker may be subject to the reader’s or listener’s interpretation of facts and events, establishing either a favorable or unfavorable bias throughout the text.
Presupposition deals with implicit meanings conveyed by the speaker through the use of particular words. There are six types of presupposition or presupposition triggers (Yule, 1996). Those are existential, factive, lexical, structural, non-factive, and counter-factual. Karttunen cited in Levinson (1983) further mentions cleft construction, relative, and adverbial presuppositions briefly which still included structural presupposition.
Examples below are types of presupposition or triggering elements taken from Yule (1996).
A. Existential presupposition is the assumption of the existence of the entities named by the speaker. It is signed by the use of noun phrases and possessive construction.
For Example:
Eg. The teacher taught Math >> there is a teacher
Eg. Andy is a professor >> there is a professor/ Andy is an old man
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B. A factive presupposition is an assumption that something is true due to the presence of some as "know“, "realize“, “be glad”, “be sorry”, “regret”,
“aware”, “odd” etc.
For Example:
Eg: She didn’t realize he was ill >> she was ill
Eg: We regret telling him >> we told him
Eg. I wasn’t aware that she was married >> she was married
Eg . It isn’t odd that he left early >> he left early
Eg. I’m glad it’s over >> it’s over
C. Lexical Presupposition refers to using one word, the speaker can act as if another meaning will be understood. In this case, the use of the word
“stop”, “start”, “again” presuppose another (unstated) concept.
For Example:
Eg. He stopped smoking >> he used to smoke
Eg. They started complaining >> they complaining before
Eg. You’re late again >> you were late before
D. Structural presupposition refers to the assumption associated with the use of certain structures. The listener perceives that the information presented is necessarily true rather than just the presupposition of the person asking the question.
For Example:
Eg. When did he leave? >> he left
Eg. Where did you buy the bike? >> you bought the bike
E. A non-factive presupposition is an assumption referred to as something that is not true.
For Example:
E.g I dreamed that I was rich >> I was not rich.
Eg imagined we were in Hawaii >> we were not in Hawaii.
F. The counterfactual presupposition is the assumption that what is presupposed is not only untrue, but is the opposite of what is true, or contrary to facts.
For Example:
E.g. If you were my friend, you would have helped me >> You are not my friend.
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E.g. If I were not short, I would have become a stewardess >> I am short.
G. Relative and adverbial: Relative and Adverbial clauses are also found to presuppose information.
For Example:
E.g. the incident occurred in a region where there is a large Kurdish population >> there is a large Kurdish population.
E.g. it started when Tehran’s vice president warned >> this week Tehran’s vice president warned.