User:Jhj43/sandbox

Zehra's Ideas
Someone asked who Russel is in the talk page and I think it would make references to him more reliable if it was explained who he is exactly, and what relevance he has to the topic. Someone in the talk page is confused as to how "My wife is not pregnant" is not true if he does not have a wife. I can see his confusion because technically no one being talked about is pregnant, so he is not uttering any false information. However, the utterance is meaningless because the noun phrase is not referring to an existing object or human, so the entire sentence is just meaningless because it is not conveying any information. I think using the example, "The king of France is bald" is a good example to use to minimize this confusion because if there is no king of France, the utterance is meaningless in its effort to coney the information that he is bald because it is not referring to anyone or anything that exists. Someone on the talk page was confused about the difference between these two terms. I think it would be a good idea to emphasize that a presupposition refers to the common ground two speakers must share when engaging in a conversation. It is a linguistic and philosophic term used to describe a proposition that must be understood by both parties as true in order for the remaining information to make sense. A speaker can presume anything to be true, but it does not need to be true in order for two people to have a meaningful conversation. Zehrahusnain (talk) 23:56, 18 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Bertrand Russel
 * Further explain why certain sentences are meaningless
 * Explain the difference between a presumption and a presupposition

A presumption is a piece of information that is most likely to be true until further evidence can prove it to be false. On the other hand, a presupposition is a piece of background information that everyone participating in the conversation must know prior to the conversation in order for it to make sense. There is no way of changing a presupposition later in the conversation, unless the speaker directly negates that information. For example, if someone utters, "My wife got a flat tire this morning," the information is presupposed that the speaker is married; the only way that this information can be negated is if the speaker now directly states that he is not married or that the woman he was talking about is not his wife. For presumptions, if someone utters, "I woke up to Mary calling a car service to fix her flat tire," someone may presume that Mary is his wife, because there is no evidence against it and it seems to be a valid presumption given that a man of his age was sleeping in the same house as another woman; however, further evidence later in the conversation can discount this piece of information. For example, the speaker can follow up his utterance by saying, "So my wife went outside to help her." Zehrahusnain (talk) 01:56, 23 March 2018 (UTC) Sauerland, U., & Yatsushiro, K. (2017). Remind-Me Presuppositions and Speech-Act Decomposition: Evidence from Particles in Questions. Linguistic Inquiry, 48(4), 651-677. doi:10.1162/LINGa00257 Zehrahusnain (talk) 19:35, 4 April 2018 (UTC)

Wenjing's Ideas
Under Presupposition Triggers, several typed of presupposition triggers are identified, but only a few have adequate amount of examples and explanations. I think the topic of context sets could be added to this article. The two types of context sets are defective and non-defective. Defective context sets occur in the situation where presupposition differ among speakers and addressees. Non-defective means that presupposition of the various participants in the conversation are all the same. In the article, only a small amount of linguists' ideas are explained, including Russel and Strawson. There are more studies on presupposition done by others and I think they should be included too. Rebecca0725 (talk) 03:07, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Expand contents
 * Add more related topics like context sets.
 * More linguists' opinions

I think some examples of the "presupposition triggers" overlap with others. For instance, there are no examples at the "questions" section. The explanation "Presuppose a seeking for what is sought" sounds a bit abstract to me. In my opinion, this type of presupposition could be embedded in all other types. When analyzing whether a question presupposes anything, people would still go back to other triggers. Rebecca0725 (talk) 04:39, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Update


 * Presupposition triggers added

Cleft Sentences

 * Cleft sentences are usually sentences with the form of "It is X that Y". The purpose of cleft sentences are to emphasize what speakers want to say by introducing it.

Quantifiers
» There are headmasters in Rochdale. » There are more people who moved into SF in the last 16 months that John hadn't talked to.
 * I have written to every headmaster in Rochdale.
 * John talked to some of people who moved into SF in the last 16 months.

Questions
Presuppose a seeking for what is sought. The question itself is a presupposition trigger which presupposes the speaker is looking for the answer to his/her question.

Possessive case
» John has a wife. Rebecca0725 (talk) 02:48, 23 March 2018 (UTC)
 * John stopped teasing his wife.

Questions
Questions often presuppose what the assertive part presupposes, but interrogative parts might introduce further presuppositions. There are three different types of questions: yes/no questions, alternative questions and WH-questions. » Either there is a professor of linguistic at MIT or there isn't. » Newcastle is in England or Newcastle is in Australia. » Someone is the professor of linguistics at MIT. Rebecca0725 (talk) 22:03, 4 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Is there a professor of linguistic at MIT?
 * Is Newcastle is in England or is in Australia?
 * Who is the professor of linguistics at MIT?

Joyce Jo's Ideas

 * I feel that the "projection of presuppositions" section of the article is not extensive enough. It only gives one example of a filter, the conditional sentence, and does not include other examples. The other filters that should be included are 'either... or' sentences and conjunction sentences. In an 'either...or,' sentence, if the presupposition is after the 'either,' but before the 'or,' then the presupposition would project through the entire sentence. For instance, in the sentence "either my dad is kind, or I am evil by comparison," the presupposition that 'I have a dad' gets projected through the entire sentence. However, if the presupposition is after the 'or,' then whether the presupposition gets projected depends on whether the negation of the assertion before the 'or' entails the presupposition in the part of the sentence that is after the 'or.' The conjunction sentences have same rules as the conditional sentences. Also, I feel that the section the 'negation of a sentence containing a presupposition' is really talking more about reference and definiteness (or the presupposition of definite descriptions) then it is about negating presuppositions. In addition, I feel that the article did not really delineate the difference between a pragmatic presupposition and a semantic presupposition.
 * I'm moving this over from jh43/sandbox1. Please continue working here as the group shared sandbox. Cakers01 (talk) 20:03, 19 February 2018 (UTC)