M. A. I english P. C3 & C6 Modern Linguistics title pmd

7.
Presupposition
A Presuppositionis a kind of pragmatic inference. It is: 
The act of using a sentence to make a comment about some information 
assumed to be shared or verifiable by the speaker and listener. (Bates, 1976) 
What a speaker assumes to be true or to be known by the hearer. (Yule, 
1985) 
A Presupposition is something that a speaker assumes to be the case prior 
to making an utterance. For example, it would be easy to identify some of the 
potentially assumed information associated with the utterance, “John’s uncle bought 
a textile factory”. The speaker will normally be expected to have the presuppositions 
that a person called John exists and that he has an uncle who is very rich, etc. This 
suggests that presuppositions are concerned with more being communicated than 
being literally stated. Presuppositions are relations between a form of expression 
and an implicit meaning which can be reached at by a process of (pragmatic) 
inference. The process of inferring meaning cannot be imagined without taking 
contextual information into account. Presuppositions are speaker-dependent. 
Speakers, not utterances have presuppositions and therefore all the presuppositions 
in the above utterance could be wrong.
The utterance, “When did you stop beating your wife?” is another example in 
which at least 2 presuppositions are involved. The speaker presupposes that the 
hearer used to beat his wife, and that he no longer does so. 

---

114 
a) 
John’s car is fast …. (p) 
b)
John has a car ……. (q) 
p >> q (p presupposes q)
c) 
John’s car is not fast …… (p) 
d)
John has a car……….. (q) 
p >> q 
This property of Presupposition is generally described as “constancy under 
negation”. This implies that the presupposition of a given statement will remain 
constant even when the sentence is negated.