Powerpoint Templates Page 1 Presupposition By Rina Husnaini Febriyanti

Powerpoint Templates Page 2 Presupposition Introduction To presuppose To assume e.g. a sentence is said to presuppose the b sentence: a. He’s stopped turning into a werewolf every full moon. b. He used to turn into werewolf every full moon.

Powerpoint Templates Page 3 Two Approaches To Presupposition  In the philosophical tradition sentences are viewed as external objects: we don’t worry too much about the process of producing them. It means, it is essentially semantic.  On the other hand, the second approach views sentences as the utterances of individuals engaged in communication. The aim here is about modeling the strategies that speakers and hearers use to communicate with one another. We can say it is essentially pragmatic.

Powerpoint Templates Page 4 For instance: a. John’s brother has just got back from Nigeria. b. John has a brother. Presupposition as a truth relation. step 1: if p is true then q is true step 2: if p is false, q is still true. step 3: if q is true, p could be either true or false

Powerpoint Templates Page 5 A first composite truth table for presupposition If it is true that John has come back from Nigeria, it must be true that John has a brother. If it false, the presupposition that John has a brother still survive. Finally, if it is true that John has a brother, it doesn’t tell us anything about whether he has come back from Nigeria or not: we just do not know.

Powerpoint Templates Page 6 Viewing presupposition as a truth relation allows us to set up a truth table like table above, and allows us to capture an important difference between entailment and presupposition. If we negate an entailing sentence, then the entailment fails; but negating a presupposing sentence allows the presupposition survive. EntailmentPresupposition a. I saw my father today.a. The mayor of Liverpool is in town b. I saw someone today.b. There is a mayor of Liverpool a. I didn’t see my father today.a. The mayor of Liverpool isn’t in town b. I saw someone todayb. There is a mayor of Liverpool

Powerpoint Templates Page 7 Presupposition Failure The failure of presupposition happens when a statement can be neither true nor false. e.g. it is caused by nominal (construction). E.g. Heronymous is bringing a crate of champagne. If we don’t know any person called Heronymous and the response “ Who’s Heronymous?”, it’s signaling the failure.

Powerpoint Templates Page 8 Presupposition Triggers For example of lexical triggers, consider change of state verbs, like start, begin, stop. These verbs have a kind of switch presupposition: the new state is both described and is presupposed not to have held prior to the changes. a. Judy started smoking cigars. b. Judy used not to smoke cigars. a. Michelle stopped seeing werewolves. b. Michelle used to see werewolves.

Powerpoint Templates Page 9 Presupposition and Context  Defeasibility the cancelling of presupposition. E.g.a. She died before she finished her thesis. b. She finished her thesis.  Context sensitivity that describes the same essential situation (Strawson,1950) E.g.a. Alice loved someone. b. Someone loved Harry.  Intonation in English ( Jackendoff, 1972 and Allan, 1986) E.g.a. Alice loved HARRY b. ALICE loved Harry

Powerpoint Templates Page 10  Projection Problem ( Gazdar, 1979 and Levinson, 1983) narrower contextual feature. Sometimes the presupposition produced by a simple clause does not survive when the clause is incorporated into a complex sentence. E.g. a. John will regret doing linguistics. b. John is doing / will do linguistics. c. If John does linguistics, he’ll regret it. In c sentence the syntactic one is provided by the adjoining clause.

Powerpoint Templates Page 11 Pragmatic Theories of Presupposition  Leech(1981) 1.Semantic presupposition amenable to a truth – relation approach. 2. Pragmatic presupposition requires an interactional description.  Stalnaker(1974) the common ground, presupposition is essentially pragmatic phenomenon.  Lewis (1979) accommodation, presupposition can be introduced as new information.  Sperber and Wilson (1995) given and new information and focus.

Powerpoint Templates Page 12 E.g.a. It rained on MONDAY. b. On Monday it RAINED. c. On MONDAY it rained. These sentences belong to different contexts of use in similar way the examples of presupposition before and these will discussed further in chapter 7.

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