‘Presupposition can be a bluff’: How abstract nouns can be used as presupposition triggers

Abstract

This study is concerned with expressions of the type the thing is that … or the problem was that …, which are seen as constructions in the Construction Grammar sense of the term and referred to as ‘N- be-that-constructions’. The material discussed is derived from the 225-million word British section of COBUILD's Bank of English corpus. It is shown that depending on the types of nouns that they use, speakers can exploit the N- be-that-construction in the service of an array of presuppositions, among them existential and factive semantic ones as well as pragmatic ones. Special attention is devoted to two pragmatic presuppositions: first, the expectation that more specific information about the unspecific discourse entity introduced by the abstract nouns is to come in the that-clause; and second, the impression, created by the information distribution of the N- be-that-construction and its focusing function, that the initial noun phrase represents given information which is known to all discourse participants. It is argued that the latter type of pragmatic presupposition can be exploited for bluffs insofar as it allows speakers to purport information as given which is in fact new. Bluffs of this type are often combined with evidential downtoning ( my feeling is that …) or upgrading ( the truth is that …), and with the objectivization of the proposition expressed in the that-clause by backgrounding the speaker role ( the hope is that … rather than my hope is that).