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Presuppositions
1. Presuppositions. How do sentences get into the conversational background? The most obvious way is for someone to utter them, and for them to be accepted that way. But it is important to notice that that's not the only way of getting a sentence into the conversational background. If it were, you would have to say every single thing you wanted someone to understand. But as the flat tire example from the previous section showed, we can often send extra messages that weren't spoken in words. How? One very simple way is through presuppositions. A presupposition is a type of unspoken sentence that systematically “rides on the coattails” of a spoken sentence: whenever the spoken sentence is accepted into the conversational background, the unspoken presupposition sentence gets in too. We can give a two-part definition of presupposition in terms of acceptance behavior (with respect to the spoken sentence it always accompanies). |
Presupposition: If P is a presupposition of a sentence S, then 1. P is a sentence other than S, and |
(From part (i) we see that no sentence can presuppose itself.)
Example: Here, sentence (1) presupposes sentence (P1) – or in other words, (P1) is a presupposition of sentence (1). And this fits the definition of presuppositions: if someone accepts (1), they have to accept (P1) in the bargain. (If someone didn't accept the claim that “someone stole the bubblegum” – if he thought no one stole the bubblegum – then he couldn't very well accept the claim that Rex stole the bubblegum, could he?) Which sentences presuppose which other sentences – is there some general rule for this? It would be wonderful it there were a general rule for when presupositions occur, but so far linguists and logicians haven't found one. (Pragmatics is a much younger discipline than logic, and lots of things – maybe most – are still in a rough state.) What we can do here is list some fairly clear cases of presuppositions – make a kind of mini-catalogue of presupposition-bearing sentences. Examples:Cleft Sentences: Causal/Explanatory Sentences: 2. Inheritance of Presuppositions. We know already from symbolic logic that some sentences have other sentences as parts – for example, negations, conditionals, etc. all take smaller sentences as parts. Now, if the smaller sentence has some presupposition, will it carry over to the larger sentence (which the smaller sentence is a part of)? The answer seems to be: sometimes. Again, while we would like a general rule for when this happens, the best we can come up with now is a (partial) list of when presuppositions carry over from part to whole. When this happens, it is called Inheritance of a Presupposition. (Jargon Watch: figuring out exactly when a presupposition is inherited, and why, is known to Pragmatics hipsters as the “Projection Problem”.)
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Inheritance: A sentence L inherits the presupposition P of a smaller sentence S if: S is a part of the larger sentence L, and L has P as a presupposition because it has S as a part. |
Negations: Conjunctions: Disjunctions: Indicative Conditionals (where the antecedent is not assumed to be false): Epistemic modals (a modal phrase – like “must,” may,” might” – that deals with knowledge):
(1) It was Rex who stole the bubblegum
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