Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Chapter 2
presupposed information is true, only commit to pretending it is for the duration of
the dialogue.
These are just a sample of the lexical and syntactic items that have been
associated with the term presupposition. There have been many different proposals
for analyzing the triggers and the presuppositions they induce. The next section
briefly presents some central earlier proposals that laid the foundations for current
theories.
2.2 EARLIER ANALYSES OF PRESUPPOSITIONS
Two major problems in analyzing presuppositions were discussed in the early
literature on this subject. 5 The first is the problem of presupposition failure, and
has to do with what happens when a sentence presupposes something that isn’t
true, and the second is the projection problem, already mentioned in the previous
section. The first problem was originally noticed by Frege (1892) and introduced as
follows in “Über Sinn und Bedeutung.”
“If anything is asserted there is always an obvious presupposition that the simple or compound
proper names used have reference. If one therefore asserts ‘Kepler died in misery.’ there is a
presupposition that the name ‘Kepler’ designates something; but it does not follow that the sense of
the sentence ‘Kepler died in misery’ contains the thought that the name ‘Kepler’ designates
something. If this were the case the negation would have to run not
Kepler did not die in misery
but
Kepler did not die in misery, or the name ‘Kepler’ has no reference.
That the name ‘Kepler designates something is just as much a presupposition for the assertion
Kepler died in misery
as for the contrary assertion.”
An important point here is that Frege makes a distinction between presupposed
information and asserted information, and points out that presupposition has to
hold both for affirmative as well as the negated version of the sentence. Frege then
remarked that
“A logically perfect language (Begriffsschrift) should satisfy the conditions, that every expression
grammatically well constructed as a proper name out of signs already introduced shall in fact
5 For a more detailed summary of the history and development of theories of presupposition see
van der Sandt (1988) or Beaver (1997).
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