In the branch of linguistics known as pragmatics, a presupposition (or PSP) is an implicit assumption about the world or background belief relating to an utterance whose truth is taken for granted in discourse.
Jane no longer writes fiction. (PSP: Jane once wrote fiction.)
A presupposition must be mutually known or assumed by the speaker and addressee for the utterance to be considered appropriate in context.
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.
Linguistic entailments occur when one may draw necessary conclusions from a particular use of a word.
"If A then B," meaning that if A is true, then B must also be true.
A more real-world example would be something like this.
"If it is a shoe, then it is made to be worn on a foot."
In pragmatics, entailment falls in a category with implicature and presupposition. All three deal with assumptions made by the listener or reader about a situation.
Implicature is a technical term in the pragmatics linguistics, coined by H. P. Grice, which refers to what is suggested in an utterance, even though neither expressed nor strictly implied (that is, entailed) by the utterance.
"Mary had a baby and got married"
This sentence strongly suggests that Mary had the baby before the wedding, but the sentence would still be strictly true if Mary had her baby after she got married.
Further, if we append the qualification "not necessarily in that order" to the original sentence, then the implicature is now cancelled even though the meaning of the original sentence is not altered.
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This can be contrasted with cases of entailment. The statement "the President was assassinated", for example, not only suggests that "the President is dead" is true, but requires this to be so.
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Similarly, unlike implicatures, entailments cannot be cancelled; there is no qualification that one could add to "the president was assassinated" which would cause it to cease entailing "the president is dead" while also preserving the meaning of the first sentence.
The cooperative principle describes how effective communication in conversation is achieved in common social situations, that is, how listeners and speakers must act cooperatively and mutually accept one another to be understood in a particular way.
The cooperative principle can be divided into four maxims, called the Gricean maxims, describing specific rational principles observed by people who obey the cooperative principle; these principles enable effective communication.
- Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange).
- Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
- Do not say what you believe to be false.
- Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
- Be relevant.
- Avoid obscurity of expression.
- Avoid ambiguity.
- Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity).
- Be orderly.
A speaker who is assumed to be cooperative, can be interpreted as meaning more than he literally says, either by following the maxims or by intentionally flouting them.
- “Quietly and unostentatiously”
I ask, Do you love me? And you answer Yes. (supposing you don’t really: quietly violates maxim of quality; hence, a lie – no implicature possible)
- Overtly opting out of a maxim
A colleague asks, How is the job search going? and I respond, Sorry, that’s confidential.
- Coping with a clash between maxims
Another student asks you, Where does Professor Morgan live? and you answer, Somewhere in Providence.
- Flouting a maxim in order to exploit it
Flouting the first Maxim of Quality (avoid falsehoods): A: Tehran's in Turkey, isn't it? B: Uh-huh, and Boston's in Armenia.
Inferences fill in missing information that is not explicitly stated in the discourse. They are activated from previous information of the current discourse, or from stored knowledge of past experiences. Most of the time, inferences are needed to make sense of the text or conversation.
Bridging inferences connect statements through commonly held world knowledge, and are essential for comprehensive discourse.
The spy quickly threw his report in the fire. The ashes floated up the chimney.
Here the readers must draw the inference that the report burned in the fire.
Causal inferences are made when the reason for one statement is drawn from information from an other. Narratives are full of causal relationships which allow readers to form connections and make sense of the text.
John was murdered yesterday. The knife lay nearby.
- The intention of the speaker is to make the listener understand his/her utterances.
- Utterances are never meant to be understood in isolation.
- Understanding is always based on the assumption that speaker and listener share some mutual knowledge and beliefs.
- Listeners make bridging inferences based on their shared knowledge (design assumption) with the speaker.
I visited my old aunt. She felt happy.
I visted my old aunt. She is sick.
I visited my old aunt. My roommate went to his friend's place.
I visited my old aunt. She is my father's sister.
I visited my old aunt. We chatted all afternoon. Later, I made tea.
I wanted to visit my old aunt. But, I couldn't go because of the agitation.
A discourse structure does not result from the coherence relations between all adjacent pairs of sentences. Discourse has an overall global structure.
John ordered a sandwich. He was disappointed. He left no tip. (Restaurant script helps in bridging inferences)
Here is another example.
John proposed to Mary last week. The wedding is next month. I am so excited. (Knowledge of courtship/wedding helps in bridging inferences)
There are five types of structures
- Frames
- Schemata
- Goals and Plans
- Scripts
- Story Grammar
S1: John went to the bank to deposit his paycheck.
S2: He then took a train to Bill's car dealership.
S3: He needed to buy a car.
S4: The company he works for isn't near any public transportation.
S5: He wanted to talk to Bill about their softball league.
Occasion (e1, e2) -> S1 (e1) + Explanation (e2)
Explanation (e2) -> S2 (e2) + Parallel (e3, e5)
Parallel (e3, e5) -> Explanation (e3) + S5 (e5)
Explanation (e3) -> S3 (e3) + S4 (e4)
The macrostructure takes all of the information given and inferences made in a text, and reduces it to its essential components, leaving the reader with the “gist” of the discourse.
As mentioned above, we organize material in discourse literature based on our prior experience to the things or situations being described. Our previous knowledge for particular situations are organized into categories known as schemata.
Although schemata are “prepackaged” reserves of knowledge which we apply to discourse comprehension, readers and listeners maintain flexibility within their schemata and can update them depending on the context of the discourse. Different factors, such as route, number of passengers, weather, etc, cause subtle changes in the bus schema.
Scripts are similar to schemata, though they are more specific and are not as flexible based on context. Scripts carry detailed information on how events unfold and in what particular order.
In the restaurant script, for example, the participants wait to be seated, a host or waiter takes them to their table and gives them menus. The participants are then left to choose something off the menu, they order food, wait for food, then eat it. Then they wait for the bill, pay the bill, and leave (Jay, 2003).
Knowing the script guides people on how to behave in a restaurant situation, and provides an outline for how to write stories involving restaurants.
RST addresses text organization by means of relations that hold between parts of text. It explains coherence by postulating a hierarchical, connected structure of texts.
- Coherent texts constit of minimal units, which are linked to each other, recursively, through rhetorical relations (or coherent or discourse relations).
Coherence in linguistics is what makes text semantically meaningful.
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Units of discourse
- Texts can be segmented into minimal units.
- All units are also spans, and spans may be composed of more that one unit.
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Nuclearity
- Some spans are more central to the texts purpose (called nuclei) whereas others play secondary role (called satellites).
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Relations among spans
- Spans are joined into discourse relations.
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Hierarchy/Recursion
- Spans that are in a discourse relation may enter into new relations.
- They hold between two non-overlapping text spans.
- Most of the relations hold between a nucleus and a satellite.
- There are multi-nuclear relations too.
- A relation consists of
- Constraints on the Nucleus
- Constraints on the Satellite
- Constraints on the combination of Nucleus and Satellite
- The Effect
In this relation, a claim is followed by the evidence for this claim. Claim is more essential to the text than the particular evidence. So the claim span is called the nucleus and the evidence span is called a satellite.
| Relation Name | Nucleus | Satellite |
|---|---|---|
| Background | text whose understanding is being facilitated | text for facilitating understanding |
| Elaboration | basic information | additional information |
| Preparation | text to be presented | text which prepares the reader to expect and interpret the text to be presented. |
If relation does not have a particular span of text which is more central to the author's purposes, it is called multinuclear.
| Relation Name | Nucleus | Satellite |
|---|---|---|
| Contrast | one alternate | another alternate |
In this example both the alternates have equal importance.
They relate the content of the text spans.
- Cause
- Purpose
- Condition
- Summary
They are more rhetorical in nature. They are meant to achieve some effect on the reader.
- Motivation
- Antithesis
- Background
- Evidence
Deixis refers to words and phrases, such as “me” or “here”, that cannot be fully understood without additional contextual information - in this case, the identity of the speaker (“me”) and the speaker's location (“here”). Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their denotational meaning varies depending on time and/or place.
Person deixis concerns itself with the grammatical persons involved in an utterance, (1) those directly involved (e.g. the speaker, the addressee), (2) those not directly involved (e.g. overhearers—those who hear the utterance but who are not being directly addressed), and (3) those mentioned in the utterance.
I am going to the movie.
Would you like to have dinner?
Place deixis, also known as space deixis, concerns itself with the spatial locations relevant to an utterance.
I enjoy living in this city.
Here is place where we will find the statue.
Time, or temporal, deixis concerns itself with the various times involved in and referred to in an utterance. This includes time adverbs like "now", "then", "soon", and so forth, and also different tenses.
He had gone.
Discourse deixis, also referred to as text deixis, refers to the use of expressions within an utterance to refer to parts of the discourse that contains the utterance — including the utterance itself.
This is a good story.
Social deixis concerns the social information that is encoded within various expressions, such as relative social status and familiarity. Two major forms of it are the so-called T–V distinctions and honorifics.
T–V distinctions, named for the Latin “tu” and “vos” (singular and plural versions of “you”) is the name given to the phenomenon when a language has two different second-person pronouns. The varying usage of these pronouns indicates something about formality, familiarity, and/or solidarity between the interactants.
Honorifics are a much more complex form of social deixis than T–V distinctions, though they encode similar types of social information. They can involve words being marked with various morphemes as well as nearly entirely different lexicons being used based on the social status of the interactants.
In linguistics, ellipsis or elliptical construction refers to the omission, from a clause, of one or more words that are nevertheless understood in the context of the remaining elements.
Redundant material that is present in the immediately preceding clause can be "gapped". This gapped material usually contains a finite verb.
John can play the guitar, and Mary can play the violin.
Should I call you, or should you call me?
Stripping is also known as bare argument ellipsis. Many linguists take stripping to be a particular manifestation of gapping whereby just one remnant appears in the gapped clause instead of the two (or more) that occur in instances of gapping.
John can play the guitar, and Mary can play the guitar, too.
Answer ellipsis involves question-answer pairs. The question focuses an unknown piece of information, often using an interrogative word (e.g. who, what, when, etc.).
Q: Who has been hiding the truth? A: Billy has been hiding the truth.