But my understanding of presupposition is basically, that presuppositions pretty much, in layman term, would be pretty much the equivalent of "read between the lines". When the speaker says something, no matter how ambiguous it may be, whether it is true or not, by simply uttering such a sentence, they assume that the listener will be able to figure out the inferred meaning behind it.
To better explain my understanding of presuppositions, I'll use this sentence as an example: "I am a fast swimmer"... by saying this, what would the listener/reader, ASSUME about me?
Presupposition is the information that can be construed from an utterance. For example: "My cousin Karina and her boyfriend Christian shopped in my store last weekend." The information that can be inferred is that 1. I have a cousin, 2. Her name is Karina, 3. She has a boyfriend, 4. His name is Christian, and 5. They shopped in my store last weekend. The information that can be "read between the lines" is 1. I have a job in retail and possibly 2. They shopped for underwear ( because the information the listener might know about me is that I work at a Victoria's Secret store).
ReplyDeleteOn a nice weekend, it is a good idea to stay home and enjoy. You are hungry but do not want to move. Then, probably you will say "Mom, get me a piece of cake." You asked your mom to get you a piece of cake >> There are cakes at home.
ReplyDeleteIn our daily lives, we always make presupposition. Through making presupposition, the speaker has an assumption on certain things.
There are several types of presuppositions. I love New York City>> There is a thing calls "New York City" or I will not be able to love it. This is existential presupposition.
I am glad that they finally got marry>> They got marry. This is factive presupposition.
In lexical presupposition, one word in an utterance can presuppose a concept. For example, the baby finally stop crying >> the baby kept crying before.
When dealing with structural presupposition, we need to be careful. As the note says "this can lead people to believe something is true rather than just presupposed." Some one ask " How do you do plagiarism without being discovered?" >> You have experience in doing plagiarism. Maybe you did the research paper by yourself. Yet, you got a really good grade and your classmate could not believe that you did it by yourself.
Something that happened in your dream is considered non-factive presupposition. For example, I dreamed that I bought a nice car. >> I don't have money to buy a car.
The last type of presupposition is counter-factual presupposition. If you were prudent driver, you wouldn't got into the accident >> You are not a prudent driver. The driver got into an accident does not mean that the driver is not prudent but maybe another driver ran the red light.
Entailment is the opposite of presupposition. As the note says, “It must be the case in order to utter the sentence.” In an example, “Thomas broke a vase”, if foreground entailment is used, the speaker either emphasize the person who broke the vase, Thomas broke something, or Thomas did something to the vase. But the most important is that this incident did happen.
To answer Julio’s question if the following question about saying “I am a fast swimmer” the listener would presuppose that the speaker is a swimmer. Another example for this occurred when today, September 25, 2013 around 6pm when I said to a female passenger that was sitting next to me:
ReplyDeleteExcuse me, This is your stop!
Passenger: Oh! Thank you. I am surprised how quickly that was.
This presupposition is called a factive presupposition because the information has a factive verb which shows emotion. In this example the passenger sentence presupposes that she was surprised.
Another example of a presupposition is when I caught my sister saying, “My doll has pretty hair,” which presupposes that she has a doll. This kind of presupposition is an existential presupposition because since she is talking about the doll then it exist in the world.