Linguistic Presupposition

Abstract

Presuppositional information is encoded in linguistic expressions by means of so-called presupposition triggers or presupposition inducers. These items are linguistic means that signal that certain information is taken for granted in the linguistic or non-linguistic context. One task for presupposition theory is to identify these triggers, explain what type of information they induce, and why they do so. A second task is to explain why and under what circumstances the information thus induced is preserved as an intuitive inference of the inducing sentence. The latter problem is the projection problem for presuppositions. Theories of presupposition can be divided into the following main classes: semantic, pragmatic, and dynamic theories. Semantic theories explain presupposition as a semantic relation between sentences. Pragmatic theories take the information a speaker takes for granted in making an assertion as their starting point. Dynamic theories locate sentence meaning in its context-change potential: presuppositional information should be part of input context as a precondition for contextual update. The two major variants are the satisfaction account and the anaphoric account. The former construes presuppositions as definedness conditions on input contexts. According to the anaphoric account presuppositional expressions are anaphors that should be bound to a contextually given antecedent.