Presupposition

Common card · No. 394915

In linguistics and philosophy, a presupposition is an implicit assumption about the world or background belief relating to an utterance, whose truth is taken for granted in discourse. An example is the question Have you talked to Hans? which presupposes Hans exists. A presupposition is information that is linguistically presented as being mutually known or assumed by the speaker and addressee. This may be required for the utterance to be considered appropriate in context, but it is not uncommon for new information to be encoded in presuppositions without disrupting the flow of conversation (see accommodation below). A presupposition remains mutually known by the speaker and addressee 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...

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