In the branch of
linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...
known as
pragmatics
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 int ...
, a presupposition (or PSP) is an
implicit assumption
A tacit assumption or implicit assumption is an assumption that underlies a logical argument, course of action, decision, or judgment that is not explicitly voiced nor necessarily understood by the decision maker or judge. These assumptions may be ...
about the world or background belief relating to an utterance whose truth is taken for granted in
discourse
Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of communication. Discourse is a major topic in social theory, with work spanning fields such as sociology, anthropology, continental philosophy, and discourse analysis. ...
. Examples of presuppositions include:
* ''Jane no longer writes fiction.''
** Presupposition: Jane once wrote fiction.
* ''Have you stopped eating meat?''
** Presupposition: you had once eaten meat.
* ''Have you talked to Hans?''
** Presupposition: Hans exists.
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
In lexicography, a lexical item is a single word, a part of a word, or a chain of words ( catena) that forms the basic elements of a language's lexicon (≈ vocabulary). Examples are ''cat'', ''traffic light'', ''take care of'', ''by the way' ...
or grammatical feature (presupposition trigger) in the utterance.
Crucially,
negation
In logic, negation, also called the logical complement, is an operation that takes a proposition P to another proposition "not P", written \neg P, \mathord P or \overline. It is interpreted intuitively as being true when P is false, and false ...
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
Logical consequence (also entailment) is a fundamental concept in logic, which describes the relationship between statements that hold true when one statement logically ''follows from'' one or more statements. A valid logical argument is one ...
and
implicature
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 sayi ...
. For example, ''The president was assassinated'' entails that ''The president is dead'', but if the expression is negated, the
entailment
Logical consequence (also entailment) is a fundamental concept in logic, which describes the relationship between statements that hold true when one statement logically ''follows from'' one or more statements. A valid logical argument is one ...
is not
necessarily true
Logical truth is one of the most fundamental concepts in logic. Broadly speaking, a logical truth is a statement which is true regardless of the truth or falsity of its constituent propositions. In other words, a logical truth is a statement whic ...
.
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:
# Both the sentence and its negation are false; or
#
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
A referent () is a person or thing to which a name – a linguistic expression or other symbol – refers. For example, in the sentence ''Mary saw me'', the referent of the word ''Mary'' is the particular person called Mary who is being spoken of, ...
which can be described with the noun phrase ''my wife'') and therefore can not be assigned
truth value
In logic and mathematics, a truth value, sometimes called a logical value, is a value indicating the relation of a proposition to truth, which in classical logic has only two possible values (''true'' or '' false'').
Computing
In some progr ...
s.
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British mathematician, philosopher, logician, and public intellectual. He had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, ...
tries to solve this dilemma with two interpretations of the negated sentence:
# "There exists exactly one person, who is my wife and who is not pregnant"
# "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 language, a clause is a constituent that comprises a semantic predicand (expressed or not) and a semantic predicate. A typical clause consists of a subject and a syntactic predicate, the latter typically a verb phrase composed of a verb with ...
. 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.
# John thinks that my wife is beautiful.
# 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
Lauri Juhani Karttunen was an adjunct professor in linguistics at Stanford and an ACL Fellow. He died in 2022.
Career
Karttunen received his Ph.D. in Linguistics in 1969 from Indiana University in Bloomington. At the University of Texas at Aust ...
, 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 conditional
In natural languages, an indicative conditional is a conditional sentence such as "If Leona is at home, she isn't in Paris", whose grammatical form restricts it to discussing what could be true. Indicatives are typically defined in opposition to c ...
s ("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
Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy
Philosophy (f ...
and
pragmatics
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 int ...
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. The following is a selection of presuppositional triggers following
Stephen C. Levinson
Stephen C. Levinson FBA (born 6 December 1947)[LEVINSON, Prof. Stephen Curtis ...](_blank)
's classic textbook on ''Pragmatics'', which in turn draws on a list produced by
Lauri Karttunen
Lauri Juhani Karttunen was an adjunct professor in linguistics at Stanford and an ACL Fellow. He died in 2022.
Career
Karttunen received his Ph.D. in Linguistics in 1969 from Indiana University in Bloomington. At the University of Texas at Aust ...
. As is customary, the presuppositional triggers themselves are italicized, and the symbol » stands for 'presupposes'.
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.
* John saw ''the man with two heads.''
»there exists a man with two heads.
Factive verbs
In Western epistemology, there is a tradition originating with
Plato
Plato ( ; grc-gre, Πλάτων ; 428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) was a Greek philosopher born in Athens during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. He founded the Platonist school of thought and the Academy, the first institution ...
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
Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.
P ...
explored this question in a
popular science
''Popular Science'' (also known as ''PopSci'') is an American digital magazine carrying popular science content, which refers to articles for the general reader on science and technology subjects. ''Popular Science'' has won over 58 awards, incl ...
format in a 2007 book on language and cognition, using a widely publicized example from a speech by a U.S. president.
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." 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.
* Martha ''regrets'' drinking John's home brew.
** Presupposition: Martha did in fact drink John's home brew.
* Frankenstein was ''aware'' that Dracula was there.
** Presupposition: Dracula was in fact there.
* John ''realized'' that he was in debt.
** Presupposition: John was in fact in debt.
* It was ''odd'' how proud he was.
** Presupposition: He was in fact proud.
Some further factive predicates: ''know; be sorry that; be proud that; be indifferent that; be glad that; be sad that.''
Implicative verbs
* John ''managed'' to open the door.
»John tried to open the door.
* John ''forgot'' to lock the door.
»John ought to have locked, or intended to lock, the door.
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.
[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.]
* John ''stopped'' teasing his wife.
»John had been teasing his wife.
* Joan ''began'' teasing her husband.
»Joan hadn't been teasing her husband.
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.
* The flying saucer came ''again''.
»The flying saucer came before.
* You can't get gobstoppers ''anymore''.
»You once could get gobstoppers.
* Carter ''returned'' to power.
»Carter held power before.
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.
* ''Before'' Strawson was even born, Frege noticed presuppositions.
»Strawson was born.
* ''While'' Chomsky was revolutionizing linguistics, the rest of social science was asleep.
»Chomsky was revolutionizing linguistics.
* ''Since'' Churchill died, we've lacked a leader.
»Churchill died.
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.
* ''Cleft construction:'' It was Henry that kissed Rosie.
»Someone kissed Rosie.
* ''Pseudo-cleft construction:'' What John lost was his wallet.
»John lost something.
Comparisons and contrasts
Comparisons and contrasts may be marked by stress (or by other prosodic means), by particles like "too", or by comparatives constructions.
* Marianne called Adolph a male chauvinist, and then ''HE'' insulted ''HER''.
»For Marianne to call Adolph a male chauvinist would be to insult him.
* Carol ''is a better linguist than'' Barbara.
»Barbara is a linguist.
Counterfactual conditionals
* ''If'' the notice ''had'' only ''said'' 'mine-field' in Welsh as well as in English, we ''would'' never ''have lost'' poor Llewellyn.
»The notice didn't say 'mine-field' in Welsh.
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.
* ''Is there'' a professor of linguistics at MIT?
»Either there is a professor of linguistics at MIT or there isn't.
* ''Is'' Newcastle in England ''or'' in Australia?
»Newcastle is in England or Newcastle is in Australia.
* ''Who is'' the professor of linguistics at MIT?
»Someone is the professor of linguistics at MIT.
Possessive case
* Johns'' children are very noisy.
»John has children.
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 description
In formal semantics and philosophy of language, a definite description is a denoting phrase in the form of "the X" where X is a noun-phrase or a singular common noun. The definite description is ''proper'' if X applies to a unique individual or o ...
s) allow for such accommodation. In "Presupposition and Anaphora: Remarks on the Formulation of the Projection Problem", the philosopher
Saul Kripke
Saul Aaron Kripke (; November 13, 1940 – September 15, 2022) was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition. He was a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and emerit ...
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
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of discourse that views language as a form of social practice. CDA combines critique of discourse and explanation of how it figures within and contributes to the exi ...
(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.
[
"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
", chapter 18 in Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen and Heidi E. Hamilton (eds.),
The Handbook of Discourse Analysis
', (Wiley-Blackwell
Wiley-Blackwell is an international scientific, technical, medical, and scholarly publishing business of John Wiley & Sons. It was formed by the merger of John Wiley & Sons Global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business with Blackwell Publish ...
, 2003): pp. 352–371.
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.
With the purpose of first identifying and then tackling inequality in society, van Dijk describes CDA as a nonconformist piece of work.
One notable feature of ideological presuppositions researched in CDA is a concept termed
synthetic personalisation
Synthetic personalisation is the process of addressing mass audiences as though they were individuals through inclusive language usage. It developed from critical discourse analysis (CDA), a branch of sociolinguistics concentrating upon how power ...
Logical construct
To describe a ''presupposition'' in the context of
propositional calculus
Propositional calculus is a branch of logic. It is also called propositional logic, statement logic, sentential calculus, sentential logic, or sometimes zeroth-order logic. It deals with propositions (which can be true or false) and relations b ...
and
truth-bearer
A truth-bearer is an entity that is said to be either true or false and nothing else. The thesis that some things are true while others are false has led to different theories about the nature of these entities. Since there is divergence of o ...
s,
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
A semantic theory of truth is a theory of truth in the philosophy of language which holds that truth is a property of sentences.
Origin
The semantic conception of truth, which is related in different ways to both the correspondence and deflati ...
,
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.
[ Nuel D. Belnap, Jr. (1966) "Questions, Answers, and Presuppositions", ]The Journal of Philosophy
''The Journal of Philosophy'' is a monthly peer-reviewed academic journal on philosophy, founded in 1904 at Columbia University. Its stated purpose is "To publish philosophical articles of current interest and encourage the interchange of ideas, es ...
63(20): 609–11, American Philosophical Association
The American Philosophical Association (APA) is the main professional organization for philosophers in the United States. Founded in 1900, its mission is to promote the exchange of ideas among philosophers, to encourage creative and scholarly ...
Eastern Division Sixty-Third Annual Meeting.
See also
*
Common ground
*
Conversational scoreboard In linguistics and philosophy of language, the conversational scoreboard is a tuple which represents the discourse context at a given point in a conversation. The scoreboard is updated by each speech act performed by one of the interlocutors.
Mo ...
*
Double-barreled question
A double-barreled question (sometimes, ''double-direct question'') is an informal fallacy. It is committed when someone asks a question that touches upon more than one issue, yet allows only for one answer.Alan Bryman, Emma Bell, ''Business resear ...
*
Dynamic semantics Dynamic semantics is a framework in logic and natural language semantics that treats the meaning of a sentence as its potential to update a context. In static semantics, knowing the meaning of a sentence amounts to knowing when it is true; in dynami ...
*
Fallacy of many questions
*
Loaded question
A loaded question is a form of complex question that contains a controversial assumption (e.g., a presumption of guilt).
Such questions may be used as a rhetorical tool: the question attempts to limit direct replies to be those that serve the qu ...
*
Performative contradiction A performative contradiction (german: performativer Widerspruch) arises when the propositional content of a statement contradicts the presuppositions of asserting it. An example of a performative contradiction is the statement "I am dead" because th ...
*
Speech act
In the philosophy of language and linguistics, speech act is something expressed by an individual that not only presents information but performs an action as well. For example, the phrase "I would like the kimchi; could you please pass it to me?" ...
References
Further reading
Beaver, David 1997. Presupposition. In J. van Benthem and
A. ter Meulen (eds.), ''The Handbook of Logic and Language'', Elsevier, pp. 939–1008.
Henk Zeevat 2007. Accommodation. In Ramchand, G. and C. Reiss (eds.),
The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Interfaces', Oxford University Press''. pp. 503–538.
External links
*
{{Formal semantics
Semantics
Pragmatics
Concepts in logic
Cognitive inertia
Formal semantics (natural language)