Abstract
In Chapter 15, I remarked that the notion of presupposition was originally developed as a semantic notion, and that the pragmatic notion investigated above was conceived of merely as an alternative interpretation of presupposition. That situation has changed, however, due to the recognition of facts of presuppositions which have turned out to be difficult to account for within semantics: presuppositions seem to be sensitive to the context, both to the external context of use, and to the intra-sentential context. They are context-sensitive in the sense that they seem to disappear in certain contexts: presuppositions are thus said have the property of defeasibility. Here are a few examples of this property, taken from Levinson (1983): Example 1. Sue died before she finished her thesis
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