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. Examples of presuppositions include: 展开

If 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 … 展开

A presupposition trigger is a lexical item or linguistic construction which is responsible for the presupposition, and thus "triggers" it. The following is a selection of presuppositional triggers following Stephen C. Levinson's classic textbook on Pragmatics, which in … 展开

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a broad study belonging to not one research category. It focuses on identifying presuppositions of an … 展开

A presupposition of a part of an utterance is sometimes also a presupposition of the whole utterance, and sometimes not. For instance, the phrase my wife triggers the presupposition that I have a wife. The first sentence below carries that presupposition, even … 展开

A presupposition of a sentence must normally be part of the common ground of the utterance context (the shared knowledge of the interlocutors) in order for the sentence to be felicitous. Sometimes, however, sentences may carry presuppositions that are … 展开

To describe a presupposition in the context of propositional calculus and truth-bearers, Belnap defines "A sentence is a presupposition of a question if the truth of the sentence is a necessary condition of the question's having some true answer." Then referring to the 展开