1. Term Paper for the requirement of
Mphil Degree
Topic: Presupposition
Supervised by: Dr. Iqbal Butt
Name: Ijaz Ahmed
Discipline: Mphil in Linguistics
Institution: NCBA&E Gujrat Campus

2. Abbstract
In this paper presupposition had been discussed in detail its types and its triggers. And
data had been taken from short story Button, Button written by Richard Mathson. And
quantitative research methodology had been applied for this research.

3. Acknowledgement
I would like to express my special appreciation and thanks to my advisor Professor Dr.
Iqbal Butt you have been a tremendous mentor for me. I would like to thank you for encouraging
my research and for allowing me to grow as a research scientist. Your advice on both research as
well as on my career have been priceless.. I also want to thank you for letting my defense be an
enjoyable moment, and for your brilliant comments and suggestions, thanks to you..A special
thanks to my family. Words cannot express how grateful I am to my mother-in law, father-in-law,
my mother, and father for all of the sacrifices that you’ve made on my behalf. Your prayer
for me was what sustained me thus far. I would also like to thank all of my friends who
supported me in writing, and incented me to strive towards my goal. At the end I would like to
thank my Allah Who blessed me with His blessings a lot.

4. Table of content
Chapter 1 ………………………………………….
Introduction
Chapter 2……………………………………………
Literature Review
Chapter 3 ……………………………………………
Data Analysis
Chapter 4……………………………………………
Conclusion

5. Chapter 1
Introduction:
In the branch of linguistics known as pragmatics, a presupposition (or ps) 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:
 Jane no longer writes fiction.
 Presupposition: Jane once wrote fiction.
 Have you stopped eating meat?
 Presupposition: you had once eaten meat.
 Have you talked to Hans?
 Presupposition: Hans exists.
A presupposition must be mutually known or assumed by the speaker and addressee for
the utterance to be considered appropriate in context. It will generally remain a necessary
assumption 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.

6. Crucially, 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 presuppose that the subject has done it already one or
more times; My wife is pregnant and My wife is not pregnant both presuppose that the subject
has a wife. In this respect, presupposition is distinguished from entailmentand implicature. For
example, The president was assassinated entails that The president is dead, but if the expression
is negated, the entailment is not necessarily true.
Negation of sentence containing a Presupposition
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 the sentence and its negation are false; or
2. Strawson's approach: Both "my wife is pregnant" and "my wife is not pregnant" use a
wrong presupposition (i.e. that there exists a referent which can be described with the
noun phrase my wife) and therefore can not be assigned truth values.
Bertrand Russell tries to solve this dilemma with two interpretations of the negated sentence:
1. "There exists exactly one person, who is my wife and who is not pregnant"
2. "There does not exist exactly one person, who is my wife and who is pregnant."

7. For the first phrase, Russell would claim that it is false, whereas the second would be true
according to him.
Presupposition Triggers
A presupposition trigger is a lexical item or linguistic construction which is responsible for the
presupposition.[2] The following is a selection of presuppositional triggers following Stephen C. Levinson
classic textbook on Pragmatics, which in turn draws on a list produced by Lauri Karttunen. As is customary,
the presuppositional triggers themselves are italicized, and the symbol » stands for 'presupposes'
Definite descriptions
Definite descriptions are phrases of the form "the X" where X is a noun phrase. The description is said to
be properwhen the phrase applies to exactly one object, and conversely, it is said to be improper when either
there exist more than one potential referents, as in "the senator from Ohio", or none at all, as in "the king of
France". In conventional speech, definite descriptions are implicitly assumed to be proper, hence such phrases
trigger the presupposition that the referent is unique and existent.
 John saw the man with two heads.
»there exists a man with two heads.
Factive verbs
In Western epistemology, there is a tradition originating with Plato of defining knowledge as justified
true belief. On this definition, for someone to know X, it is required that X be true. A linguistic question thus

8. arises regarding the usage of such phrases: does a person who states "John knows X" implicitly claim the truth
of X? Steven Pinkerexplored this question in a popular science format in a 2007 book on language and
cognition, using a widely publicized example from a speech by a U.S. president.[4] A 2003 speech by George
W. Bush included the line, "British Intelligence has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant
quantities of uranium from Africa."[5] Over the next few years, it became apparent that this intelligence lead
was incorrect. But the way the speech was phrased, using a factive verb, implicitly framed the lead as truth
rather than hypothesis. The factivity thesis, the proposition that relational predicates having to do with
knowledge, such as knows, learn, remembers, and realized, presuppose the factual truth of their object,
however, was subject to notable criticism by Allan Hazlett.[6]
 Martha regrets drinking John's home brew.
»Martha drank John's home brew.
 Frankenstein was aware that Dracula was there.
»Dracula was there.
 John realized that he was in debt.
»John was in debt.
 It was odd how proud he was.
»He was proud.
Implicative verbs
 John managed to open the door.
»John tried to open the door.
 John forgot to lock the door.
»John ought to have locked, or intended to lock, the door.
Some further implicative predicates: X happened to V»X didn't plan or intend to V; X avoided Ving»X was
expected to, or usually did, or ought to V, etc.

9. Change of state verbs
 John stopped teasing his wife.
»John had been teasing his wife.
 Joan began teasing her husband.
»Joan hadn't been teasing her husband.
Some further change of state verbs: start; finish; carry on; cease; take (as in X took Y from Z » Y was
at/in/with Z);leave; enter; come; go; arrive; etc.
Iteratives
 The flying saucer came again.
»The flying saucer came before.
 You can't get gobstoppers anymore.
»You once could get gobstoppers.
 Carter returned to power.
»Carter held power before.
Further iteratives: another time; to come back; restore; repeat; for the nth time.
Temporal clauses
 Before Strawson was even born, Frege noticed presuppositions.
»Strawson was born.
 While Chomsky was revolutionizing linguistics, the rest of social science was asleep.
»Chomsky was revolutionizing linguistics.

10.  Since Churchill died, we've lacked a leader.
»Churchill died.
Further temporal clause constructors: after; during; whenever; as (as in As John was getting up, he slipped).
Cleft sentences
 Cleft construction: It was Henry that kissed Rosie.
»Someone kissed Rosie.
 Pseudo-cleft construction: What John lost was his wallet.
»John lost something.
Comparisons and contrasts
Comparisons and contrasts may be marked by stress (or by other prosodic means), by particles like
"too", or by comparatives constructions.
 Marianne called Adolph a male chauvinist, and then HE insulted HER.
»For Marianne to call Adolph a male chauvinist would be to insult him.
 Carol is a better linguist than Barbara.
»Barbara is a linguist.
Counterfactual conditionals
 If the notice had only said 'mine-field' in Welsh as well as in English, we would never have lost poor
Llewellyn.
»The notice didn't say 'mine-field' in Welsh.

11. Questions
Presuppose a seeking for what is sought.
Possessive case
 John's children are very noisy.
»John has children.

12. Chapter 2
Literature Review:
The idea that there are CONTEXTUALPR ESUPPOSITIONS over and above
SEMANTIC PRESUPPOSITIONS has been gaining in popularity in both linguistics and
philosophy. Some linguists and philosophers even argue that the semantic notion of presupposi-tion
should be abandoned in favor of the contextual one. The notion of semantic presupposition
enters contemporary philosophy of language and linguistics from the work of the logician and
philosopher Frege (1892), who was primarily interested in developing an account of the logical
form of sentences in which meaningfulness was not a suffi-cient condition for statementhood.
For him, the condition under which declarative sentences make a statement (bear a truth value)
was that each of their referring expressions should succeed in referring to an appropriate object
or objects. In Frege's view, the content of such presuppositions (i.e. what properties of an object
or objects make them 'appropriate', or what the requirement for success is) was something that
depended on the grammatical structure of sentences. A contextual presupposition differs from a
semantic one in that the content of the latter condition is determined by the grammatical structure
of a sentence type, whereas the content of the former condition is determined also by features of
the context in which a sentence token occurs. Contextual presupposition naturally applies to
utterances, while semantic presupposition naturally applies to sentences of a language.
Moreover, this difference should not be obscured by the fact that both kinds of presupposition
are conditions whose satisfaction normally requires a relation between something linguistic and
the world. Those who first developed a semantic theory within the theory of TG grammar

13. characterized the level of semantic representation as consisting of formal structures from which
the semantic properties and relations of sentences can be determined. 1 See, for example, Green
1968, Lakoff 1971, Horn 1972, Morgan 1973, and Stalnaker 1974. 2 See also Karttunen 1974,
MS.
Thus the optimal semantic representation of a sentence in a grammar is whatever formal
structure provides the simplest basis for predicting whether it is meaningful, ambiguous,
analytic, synonymous with such-and-such other sentences, etc. (Katz 1972, ch. I). The
specification of such semantic properties and relations was left open-ended, in order to
accommodate further cases that might turn out to be pre-dictable from the semantic
representations developed to predict meaningfulness, ambiguity, analyticity etc. Presupposition
was incorporated into semantic theory on the hypothesis that it is one of these further cases (Katz
1965:597-8, 1966: 211-20). Introducing presupposition as one of the semantic properties and
relations that must be predicted from an optimal semantic representation raises questions both
about the interpretation of this notion-e.g. whether it should be interpreted logically,
situationally, or in some other manner-and about the proper formal devices to use in constructing
semantic representations. Both these questions have been discussed (Katz 1972:127-50). A
contribution to these discussions was made by Langendoen & Savin (1971), who saw clearly that
the formal devices required for constructing semantic representations from which
presuppositions could be predicted would have to be part of the same machinery that provides a
composi-tional analysis of the meaning of a sentence. Their empirical survey of the facts about
how the presuppositions of the components of a complex sentence are related to the
presupposition of the complex sentence as a whole led them to formulate the following

14. hypothesis: (1) Each of the presuppositions of a component sentence in a complex sentence is a
presupposition of the entire complex sentence. But counter-examples were soon pointed out.
Morgan 1969 observes that 1 fails for sentences like: (2) If Jack has children, then all of Jack's
children are bald. As Austin 1963 points out, sentence 3, the consequent clause of 2, by itself
pre-supposes the existence of people who are children of Jack: (3) All of Jack's children are bald.
Austin writes (p. 17): 'Not only [3] but equally "[Jack's] children are not bald", presupposes that
[Jack] has children. To talk about those children, or to refer to them, presupposes that they exist.'
Yet as Morgan observes, 2 presupposes nothing beyond the existence of Jack; so here the
presupposition of a component sentence of a complex sentence is not a presupposition of the
entire sentence. Further, as Katz 1972 and Karttunen 1973 observe, the presuppositions
associated with an expression in a sentence are not, in general, associated with the complex
sentences in which such a sentence appears as a verbal complement, because referentially opaque
verbs remove such presupposi-tions. Thus, in a sentence like 4, there is no presupposition that
Santa Claus exists: (4) Bob believes that Santa Claus came last night. As Karttunen (1973:173)
puts it, one must distinguish between HOLES, PLUGS, and FILTERS-i.e., positions that let the
presuppositions associated with the expressions appearing in them become presuppositions of the
entire sentence, positions that do not let them, and positions that sometimes do and sometimes do
not.3 To avoid such counter-examples, we might restate the Langendoen-Savin hypothesis as
follows: (5) Each of the presuppositions of a component sentence in a complex sentence is a
presupposition of the entire complex sentence just in case it is associated with an expression that
appears in a hole. But 5 amounts to no more than a triviality, since holes have been characterized
so far as positions that let the presupposition of the expression occupying them become
presuppositions of the entire sentence. Thus the problem is twofold: an adequate semantic theory

15. must also set up machinery to explicate formally these metaphorical notions of holes, plugs, and
filters. That is, it must provide, in terms of such machinery, the projection mechanism that
explains 5 and 6, and tells us when the filters are open and closed: (6) No presuppositions of a
component sentence in a complex sentence are presuppositions of the entire complex sentence if
they are associated with expressions that appear in a plug. This is done by Katz (1972, MS) as
part of the formal theory of compositional semantic interpretation. In the next section, we briefly
sketch how that machinery works. Katz (1972:167) proposes that the referential positions in
propositions (senses of sentences) be formally represented by the notation of enclosure within
heavy parentheses, to distinguish them from non-referential positions. Besides non-referential
positions created by verbs of propositional attitude, such as believes in 4, the subject of exists is
non-referential in our sense. The position occupied by poisonous mushrooms in 7 is non-referential,
but its position in 8 is referential: (7) Poisonous mushrooms exist. (8) Poisonous
mushrooms killed the elephant. Since 7 asserts that there are poisonous mushrooms, it cannot be
represented as presupposing the existence of poisonous mushrooms. If it were so represented, it
would be described as having its truth condition included in its condition of statementhood, and
it would be mistakenly marked as analytic (Katz 1972: 172-8). The sense of 'referential'
represented by a pair of heavy parentheses is different from the standard one in terms of
substitutivity of identicals (Katz 1972:141)- since, supposing that toadstools is coreferential with
poisonous mushrooms, we can substitute the former for the latter in 7 as well as 8, preserving
truth. Yet, as we have just seen, we cannot regard the term position of 7 as referential in the
sense of presuppositional reference. Thus the interpretation of heavy parentheses in a reading is
simply this: a necessary condition on the (assertive) proposition repre-sented by the reading
being a statement (i.e. either true or false) is that the reading

16. Chapter 3
Data Analysis:
The data has been taken from the short story Button, Button written by Richard Mathson.
And the methodology which has been applied for this data analysis is quantitative. Through data
analysis diffferrent kinds of presupposition will be hilighted.
Sentence Presupposition Kind of Presupposition
"I'm Mr. Steward."
Mr.Steward exixts
Existential
She was sure now it was a
sales pitch.
She was not suie before lexical
"May I come in?" asked Mr.
Steward.
He was not
in
lexical
" Don't you want to know what
it is?"
She does not know about it Structural
I don't think so." she
replied.
She thinks factive
"It could prove very valuable," It is valuable lexical

17. he told her.
.
. "What are you
trying to sell?" she asked.
He is selling something Structural
"I'm not selling anything," he
answered.
He is doing something else
instead of selling
lexical
"Oh, the __________" Arthur
pointed toward the living room
Living room exixts exixtenttial
. "What is that gadget,
anyway?"
Gadget exixts Exixtential
"If you are selling something
_______" Arthur said.
Mr. Steward shook his head.
"I'm not"
He is not selling anything Counterfactual
. He reached into an inside
coat pocket and withdrew a
small
sealed envelope
Coat pocket and envelope
exixt
exixtential

18. "The bell is connected to
our office
Bell exixts exixtential
"If you push the button," Mr.
Steward told him,
"somewhere in
the world someone you don't
know will die
He does not push the button
before
counterfactural
In return for which you
will receive a payment of
$50,000."
Dollar exixts exixtential
Norma stared at the small
man. He was smiling.
Small man exixts Exixtentail
"What are you talking about?"
Arthur asked him.
He is talking Structural
"But I've just explained," he
said
He has explained earlier lexical
"Is this a practical joke?"
asked Arthur.
This is a joke structural
"Not at all. The offer is
completely genuine."
It is an offere Lexical

19. "Who do you represent?"
demanded Norma
He represents structural
"However, I assure you, the
organization is of international
scope."
Organization exixts Exixtenntial
"And take your button unit
with you."
Button exixts exixtential

20. Chapter 4
Conclusion:
At the end it can be concluded that presupposition play an important role between speaker
and adressee commun A presupposition must be equally known or understood by the presenter
and receiver for the statement to be measured suitable in context. It will generally remain a
necessary assumption 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. It is also noticed that negation does not change
presupposition.

21. Bibliography
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Kritik 100.25-50. [In Translations from the philosophical writings of Gottlob Frege, ed. by P. T.
Geach & M. Black, 68-74. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1952.]
KATZ, J. J. 1965. The relevance of linguistics to philosophy. Journal of Philosophy 62.590-601.
--. 1966. The philosophy of language. New York: Harper & Row. --. 1972. Semantic theory.
SEARLE, J. R. 1969. Speech acts. Cambridge: University Press. STALNAKER, R. 1974.
Pragmatic presuppositions. Semantics and philosophy, ed. by M. K. Munitz and P. K. Unger,
197-214. New York: NYU Press
HORN, L. 1972. On the semantic properties of logical operators in English. UCLA dissertation
KARTTUNEN, L. 1973. Presuppositionso f compound sentences. Linguistic Inquiry 4. 169-93.
HARNISH, M. MS.L ogicalf orm and implicature.T o appeari n Bever,K atz & Langendoen.
FREGE,G . 1892. Uber Sinn und Bedeutung. Zeitschriftf ur Philosophie und Philoso-phische
Kritik 100.25-50. [In Translations from the philosophical writings of Gottlob Frege, ed. by P. T.
Geach & M. Black, 68-74. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1952.]