A Cognitive Approach To Presupposition

Presupposition is an objective and pervasive phenomenon in natural language, and the study of it can reveal many things concerning human linguistic communication, such as the nature and the developing means of verbal interaction (Shu, 1989: 13). Since the notion of presupposition was first introduced in 1892 by the German philosopher Gottlob Frege in his paper On Sense and Reference, the phenomenon has long been the concern of linguists, logicians and philosophers and there has been an extensive literature on presupposition over the last forty years.The philosophical interest in it relates to debates about the nature of reference and referring expressions, while in linguistics presupposition has played an important role in the delimitation of semantics and pragmatics as different levels of analysis. Most accounts of presupposition are versions of two main views: the semantic view also known as the neo-Strawson view, and the pragmatic view. The semantic view holds that presupposition is a semantic relationship between sentences or propositions, and should be defined in terms of truth-value. The central theme that runs through such an account is the distinction between presupposition and assertion in terms of the content or truth conditions of the sentence uttered or the proposition expressed (Stalnaker, 1974 [1991: 471-472]). In other words, the semantic presuppositions of a proposition are necessitatedby the truth-value of the proposition; when any presupposition is false, the assertion lacks a truth-value. Within this view, presupposition is considered independent of pragmatic factors such as context, participants, background knowledge, etc. But since 1973, it has become increasingly clear that there are so many problems with the semantic view. Particularly, semantic theories of presupposition cannot explain the context-dependency of presuppositions or solve the projection problem. Consequently, pragmatists claim that presupposition can only be properly studied as a pragmatic phenomenon. On the pragmatic account, presuppositions put constraints on the felicitous or acceptable use of sentences, rather than conditions on truth and falsity. When an utterance presupposes P, it indicates that the speaker is presupposing P, in the sense that he is taking P as part of the common background information against which the conversation takes place, or that he is expecting the hearer to take the information conveyed by P as uncontroversial. Pragmatic theories try to account for presupposition in terms of contextual factors, belief, assumption or knowledge of the speaker or hearer, conversational principles of a Gricean nature, or notions from speech act theory. However, neither the semantic view nor the pragmatic view can provide a complete explanation for presuppositions.With the rise of cognitive science and the development of cognitive linguistics, cognitive linguists start to investigate the phenomenon from their unique perspectives. A cognitive approach to presupposition, as advanced from different perspectives, proved to be more promising in addressing a variety of issues that seem to be significant in discussing its nature and role in communication. Thus, it is first shown presuppositions may be analyzed as framing scenes of experience corresponding to idealized cognitive models, parts of which are cognitively backgrounded while others are foregrounded. In terms of this analysis it is then possible to explain how certain uses of these words and constructions serve to differentiate such background and foreground relationships and create and cancel presuppositions. The focus of the paper tries to present how mental spaces-cognitive structures that include elements corresponding to individuals, their properties, and their relations, built by specific linguistic constructions create worlds in which presuppositions may hold and may be inherited or blocked. Two kinds of phenomenon, i.e., presupposition floating and presupposition transfer are examined respectively by invoking basic rules and strategies. Finally it comes...