THEORY OF PRESUPPOSITION

Presupposition is what the speaker assumes to be the case prior to making an utterance. The concept of presupposition is often treated as the relationship between two propositions. Entailment, which is not a pragmatic concept, is what logically follows from what is asserted in the utterance. Speakers have presuppositions while sentences, not speakers, have entailments.

In presupposition, we have a sentence that contains a proposition (p) and another proposition (q), which is easily presupposed by any listener. In pragmatics entailments the relationship between two sentences where the truth of one (a) requires the truth of the other (b).

According to (Yule, Pragmatics, 1996), there are six types of presupposition:

1.      Existential Presupposition:

It is an assumption that the speaker is fixed to the existence of the object name, and it is an assumption that exists in the noun phrase.

2.      Factive Presupposition

It is the assumption that is true or it is fact and can identify by some verbs such as ‘know’, ‘realize’, ‘ regret’, ‘be’, ‘ aware’, ‘odd’, and ’ glad’.

3.      Lexical Presupposition

In lexical presupposition, the use of one form with its asserted meaning is conventionally interpreted with the presupposition of another (non-asserted) meaning. The speaker can convey another meaning using one word. For examples, involving the lexical items, ‘stop’ start, and ‘again’. 

4.      Structural Presupposition

It is the assumption associated with the use of certain words and phrase and assumed to be true, for example, WH question construction in English are conventionally interpreted with the presupposition that the information after the WH- form is already known to be case.

5.      Non-factive Presupposition

It is the assumption that is assumed not to be true and which is identified by presence of some verb such as ‘dream’, ‘image’, ‘pretend’. Those are used with presupposition that what is not true. 

6.      Counterfactual Presupposition

Counter factual presupposition implies that what is presupposed is not only ‘non true’ but also opposite to what is true or contrary to fact. For instance, some conditional structure, generally called counterfactual conditionals presuppose that the information in “if” clause is not at the time of utterances.