Term Paper for the requirement of Mphil Degree

Topic: Presupposition

Supervised by: Dr. Iqbal Butt

Name: Ijaz Ahmed

Discipline: Mphil in Linguistics

Institution: NCBA&E Gujrat Campus

Abbstract

In this paper presupposition had been discussed in detail its types and its triggers. And data had been taken from short story Button, Button written by Richard Mathson. And quantitative research methodology had been applied for this research.

Acknowledgement

I would like to express my special appreciation and thanks to my advisor Professor Dr. Iqbal Butt you have been a tremendous mentor for me. I would like to thank you for encouraging my research and for allowing me to grow as a research scientist. Your advice on both research as well as on my career have been priceless.. I also want to thank you for letting my defense be an enjoyable moment, and for your brilliant comments and suggestions, thanks to you..A special thanks to my family. Words cannot express how grateful I am to my mother-in law, father-in-law, my mother, and father for all of the sacrifices that you’ve made on my behalf. Your prayer for me was what sustained me thus far. I would also like to thank all of my friends who supported me in writing, and incented me to strive towards my goal. At the end I would like to thank my Allah Who blessed me with His blessings a lot.

Table of content

Chapter 1 ………………………………………….

Introduction

Chapter 2……………………………………………

Literature Review

Chapter 3 ……………………………………………

Data Analysis

Chapter 4……………………………………………

Conclusion

Chapter 1

Introduction:

In the branch of linguistics known as pragmatics, a presupposition (or ps) is an implicit

assumption about the world or background belief relating to an utterance whose truth is taken for

granted in discourse. 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 or grammatical feature (presupposition trigger) in

the utterance.

Crucially, negation 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 entailmentand implicature. For

example, The president was assassinated entails that The president is dead, but if the expression

is negated, the entailment is not necessarily true.

Negation of sentence containing a Presupposition

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:

1. Both the sentence and its negation are false; or

2. 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 which can be described with the

noun phrase my wife) and therefore can not be assigned truth values.

Bertrand Russell tries to solve this dilemma with two interpretations of the negated sentence:

1. "There exists exactly one person, who is my wife and who is not pregnant"

2. "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.

Presupposition Triggers

A presupposition trigger is a lexical item or linguistic construction which is responsible for the

presupposition.[2] The following is a selection of presuppositional triggers following Stephen C. Levinson

classic textbook on Pragmatics, which in turn draws on a list produced by Lauri Karttunen. 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 is a noun phrase. The description is said to

be properwhen 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 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 Pinkerexplored this question in a popular science format in a 2007 book on language and

cognition, using a widely publicized example from a speech by a U.S. president. [4] 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."[5] 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. The 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,

however, was subject to notable criticism by Allan Hazlett.[6]

Martha regrets drinking John's home brew.

»Martha drank John's home brew.

Frankenstein was aware that Dracula was there.

»Dracula was there.

John realized that he was in debt.

»John was in debt.

It was odd how proud he was.

»He was proud.

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 verbs

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

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

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 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

Presuppose a seeking for what is sought.

Possessive case

John's children are very noisy.

»John has children.

Chapter 2

Literature Review:

The idea that there are CONTEXTUALPR ESUPPOSITIONS over and above

SEMANTIC PRESUPPOSITIONS has been gaining in popularity in both linguistics and

philosophy. Some linguists and philosophers even argue that the semantic notion of presupposi-

tion should be abandoned in favor of the contextual one. The notion of semantic presupposition

enters contemporary philosophy of language and linguistics from the work of the logician and

philosopher Frege (1892), who was primarily interested in developing an account of the logical

form of sentences in which meaningfulness was not a suffi-cient condition for statementhood.

For him, the condition under which declarative sentences make a statement (bear a truth value)

was that each of their referring expressions should succeed in referring to an appropriate object

or objects. In Frege's view, the content of such presuppositions (i.e. what properties of an object

or objects make them 'appropriate', or what the requirement for success is) was something that

depended on the grammatical structure of sentences. A contextual presupposition differs from a

semantic one in that the content of the latter condition is determined by the grammatical structure

of a sentence type, whereas the content of the former condition is determined also by features of

the context in which a sentence token occurs. Contextual presupposition naturally applies to

utterances, while semantic presupposition naturally applies to sentences of a language.

Moreover, this difference should not be obscured by the fact that both kinds of presupposition

are conditions whose satisfaction normally requires a relation between something linguistic and

the world. Those who first developed a semantic theory within the theory of TG grammar

characterized the level of semantic representation as consisting of formal structures from which

the semantic properties and relations of sentences can be determined. 1 See, for example, Green

1968, Lakoff 1971, Horn 1972, Morgan 1973, and Stalnaker 1974. 2 See also Karttunen 1974,

MS.

Thus the optimal semantic representation of a sentence in a grammar is whatever formal

structure provides the simplest basis for predicting whether it is meaningful, ambiguous,

analytic, synonymous with such-and-such other sentences, etc. (Katz 1972, ch. I). The

specification of such semantic properties and relations was left open-ended, in order to

accommodate further cases that might turn out to be pre-dictable from the semantic

representations developed to predict meaningfulness, ambiguity, analyticity etc. Presupposition

was incorporated into semantic theory on the hypothesis that it is one of these further cases (Katz

1965:597-8, 1966: 211-20). Introducing presupposition as one of the semantic properties and

relations that must be predicted from an optimal semantic representation raises questions both

about the interpretation of this notion-e.g. whether it should be interpreted logically,

situationally, or in some other manner-and about the proper formal devices to use in constructing

semantic representations. Both these questions have been discussed (Katz 1972:127-50). A

contribution to these discussions was made by Langendoen & Savin (1971), who saw clearly that

the formal devices required for constructing semantic representations from which

presuppositions could be predicted would have to be part of the same machinery that provides a

composi-tional analysis of the meaning of a sentence. Their empirical survey of the facts about

how the presuppositions of the components of a complex sentence are related to the

presupposition of the complex sentence as a whole led them to formulate the following

hypothesis: (1) Each of the presuppositions of a component sentence in a complex sentence is a

presupposition of the entire complex sentence. But counter-examples were soon pointed out.

Morgan 1969 observes that 1 fails for sentences like: (2) If Jack has children, then all of Jack's

children are bald. As Austin 1963 points out, sentence 3, the consequent clause of 2, by itself

pre-supposes the existence of people who are children of Jack: (3) All of Jack's children are bald.

Austin writes (p. 17): 'Not only [3] but equally "[Jack's] children are not bald", presupposes that

[Jack] has children. To talk about those children, or to refer to them, presupposes that they exist.'

Yet as Morgan observes, 2 presupposes nothing beyond the existence of Jack; so here the

presupposition of a component sentence of a complex sentence is not a presupposition of the

entire sentence. Further, as Katz 1972 and Karttunen 1973 observe, the presuppositions

associated with an expression in a sentence are not, in general, associated with the complex

sentences in which such a sentence appears as a verbal complement, because referentially opaque

verbs remove such presupposi-tions. Thus, in a sentence like 4, there is no presupposition that

Santa Claus exists: (4) Bob believes that Santa Claus came last night. As Karttunen (1973:173)

puts it, one must distinguish between HOLES, PLUGS, and FILTERS-i.e., positions that let the

presuppositions associated with the expressions appearing in them become presuppositions of the

entire sentence, positions that do not let them, and positions that sometimes do and sometimes do

not.3 To avoid such counter-examples, we might restate the Langendoen-Savin hypothesis as

follows: (5) Each of the presuppositions of a component sentence in a complex sentence is a

presupposition of the entire complex sentence just in case it is associated with an expression that

appears in a hole. But 5 amounts to no more than a triviality, since holes have been characterized

so far as positions that let the presupposition of the expression occupying them become

presuppositions of the entire sentence. Thus the problem is twofold: an adequate semantic theory

must also set up machinery to explicate formally these metaphorical notions of holes, plugs, and

filters. That is, it must provide, in terms of such machinery, the projection mechanism that

explains 5 and 6, and tells us when the filters are open and closed: (6) No presuppositions of a

component sentence in a complex sentence are presuppositions of the entire complex sentence if

they are associated with expressions that appear in a plug. This is done by Katz (1972, MS) as

part of the formal theory of compositional semantic interpretation. In the next section, we briefly

sketch how that machinery works. Katz (1972:167) proposes that the referential positions in

propositions (senses of sentences) be formally represented by the notation of enclosure within

heavy parentheses, to distinguish them from non-referential positions. Besides non-referential

positions created by verbs of propositional attitude, such as believes in 4, the subject of exists is

non-referential in our sense. The position occupied by poisonous mushrooms in 7 is non-

referential, but its position in 8 is referential: (7) Poisonous mushrooms exist. (8) Poisonous

mushrooms killed the elephant. Since 7 asserts that there are poisonous mushrooms, it cannot be

represented as presupposing the existence of poisonous mushrooms. If it were so represented, it

would be described as having its truth condition included in its condition of statementhood, and

it would be mistakenly marked as analytic (Katz 1972: 172-8). The sense of 'referential'

represented by a pair of heavy parentheses is different from the standard one in terms of

substitutivity of identicals (Katz 1972:141)- since, supposing that toadstools is coreferential with

poisonous mushrooms, we can substitute the former for the latter in 7 as well as 8, preserving

truth. Yet, as we have just seen, we cannot regard the term position of 7 as referential in the

sense of presuppositional reference. Thus the interpretation of heavy parentheses in a reading is

simply this: a necessary condition on the (assertive) proposition repre-sented by the reading

being a statement (i.e. either true or false) is that the reading

Chapter 3

Data Analysis:

The data has been taken from the short story Button, Button written by Richard Mathson.

And the methodology which has been applied for this data analysis is quantitative. Through data

analysis diffferrent kinds of presupposition will be hilighted.

Sentence Presupposition Kind of Presupposition

"I'm Mr. Steward." Mr.Steward exixts Existential

She was sure now it was a

sales pitch.

She was not suie before lexical

"May I come in?" asked

Mr. Steward.

He was not

in

lexical

" Don't you want to know

what it is?"

She does not know about

it

Structural

I don't think so." she

replied.

She thinks factive

"It could prove very

valuable," he told her.

It is valuable lexical

. He is selling something Structural

. "What are you

trying to sell?" she asked.

"I'm not selling anything,"

he answered.

He is doing something

else instead of selling

lexical

"Oh, the __________" Arthur

pointed toward the living

room

Living room exixts exixtenttial

. "What is that gadget,

anyway?"

Gadget exixts Exixtential

"If you are selling

something _______" Arthur

said.

Mr. Steward shook his

head. "I'm not"

He is not selling anything Counterfactual

. He reached into an inside

coat pocket and withdrew

a small

sealed envelope

Coat pocket and envelope

exixt

exixtential

"The bell is connected to

our office

Bell exixts exixtential

"If you push the button,"

Mr. Steward told him,

"somewhere in

the world someone you

don't know will die

He does not push the

button before

counterfactural

In return for which you

will receive a payment of

$50,000."

Dollar exixts exixtential

Norma stared at the small

man. He was smiling.

Small man exixts Exixtentail

"What are you talking

about?" Arthur asked him.

He is talking Structural

"But I've just explained,"

he said

He has explained earlier lexical

"Is this a practical joke?"

asked Arthur.

This is a joke structural

"Not at all. The offer is

completely genuine."

It is an offere Lexical

"Who do you represent?"

demanded Norma

He represents structural

"However, I assure you,

the organization is of

international scope."

Organization exixts Exixtenntial

"And take your button unit

with you."

Button exixts exixtential

Chapter 4

Conclusion:

At the end it can be concluded that presupposition play an important role between speaker

and adressee commun A presupposition must be equally known or understood by the presenter

and receiver for the statement to be measured suitable 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 or grammatical feature

(presupposition trigger) in the utterance. It is also noticed that negation does not change

presupposition.

Bibliography

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