Лекции по теоретической грамматике английского языка. Тивьяева И.В. - 114 стр.

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information contained in a presupposition is backgrounded, taken for granted,

presented as something that is not currently an issue.

It is important to remember that 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 mean

that the subject has done it already one or more times; My wife is pregnant and My

wife is not pregnant both mean that the subject has a wife. In this respect,

presupposition is distinguished from implication

So, presupposition as a linguistic phenomenon is characterized by two

features, that is,

1) it can be inferred from the sentence;

2) it does not depend on negation or questioning.

Another feature characteristic of presupposition is pragmaticism, that is, the

content of presupposition is pragmatic since presupposition reflects the author’s

attitude towards what is stated or asked in the sentence.

So, presupposition possesses the following features: indirectness,

inferability, independence of negation and pragmaticism of contents. Since the first

three features do not allow any differentiation, it seems logical to classify

presuppositions according to their pragmatic contents.

Factive presupposition (factiveness)

e.g. John knows that Mary got married. John thinks that Mary got married.

Despite the identical external structure, semantically the two sentences are

different. The difference lies in the author’s attitude towards what is said in the

clause dependent on the predicate. In the first case, the author regards the

proposition Mary got married as a fact, which cannot be said about the proposition

in the second sentence. The presuppositional contents contained in these two

sentences is called factive presupposition, or factiveness. Predicates forming this

type of presupposition are referred to as factive as well as words or word

combinations expressing such predicates.

Factive words include such verbs as to admit, to amuse, to bother, to

confess, to discover, to ignore, know, to realise, to regret, etc., adjectives glad,