Presuppositions

Presuppositions

1. Definition

   • It's something that the speaker assumes and entailment is the deduction of a statement.
   • Speaker has presuppositions and sentences have entailments. Entailments is the relationship between two sentences where the truth of one requires the truth of the other.

2. Types

   • Existential
     • When the speaker mention something that exists
       • Possesive constructions eg. Peter's girlfriend has five dogs.
       • Noun phrase eg. The Cold War has ended.
   • Factive
     • When something is true.
       • Verbs such as: know,realize and regret. Eg. She didn't realize he was ill.
       • Phrases such as be, aware, odd and glad.Eg I'm glad that it's over.
   • Lexical
     • When a word has another meaning (Asserted and Non asserted).
       • Lexical items such as stop, remember, forgot, again, and start.Eg. Mary stopped running.
   • Structural
     • The information is already known. It uses certain words and phrases
       • Wh questions.Eg. When did she travel to the USA?
   • Non factive
     • When something is not true.
       • Verbs like dream,imagine and pretend.Eg. She dreams that she was famous.
   • Counter factual
     • Contrary to facts
       • It uses conditionals structures like second and third conditionals. Eg. If I were rich I would buy a ferrari.

3. Projection Problem

   • It's when a simple sentence is inside a complex sentence.
   • We can infer with entailments which are more powerful than presuppositions.
     • Ordered Entailments
       • It's considered a purely logical concept.
       • The stress in English functions to mark the main assumption of the speaker in producing an utterance. Here it's similar to cleft construction