BECOME and its presuppositions

  • In hindsight, the debate about presupposition following Frege’s discovery that the referential function of names and definite descriptions depended on the fulfillment of an existence and a uniqueness condition was curiously limited for a very long time. On the one hand, it was only in the 1960s that linguists began to take an interest and showed that presupposition was an allpervasive phenomenon far beyond this philosophers’ pet definite descriptions. And on the other hand, and this is our real concern, it is now only too obvious that the uniqueness condition is too restrictive to be applicable to the general case. An utterance of “The cat is on the mat” should not imply that there is only one cat and one mat in the whole world. The obvious move is to limit the uniqueness condition to some notion of utterance context.

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Metadaten
Author:Manfred Bierwisch
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30-1134075
URL:http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/mitarb/homepage/bierwisch/papiere/9_Bierwisch_2004_BECOME.pdf
Publisher:Humboldt-Universität
Place of publication:Berlin
Document Type:Report
Language:English
Date of Publication (online):2009/10/13
Year of first Publication:2004
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Release Date:2009/10/13
GND Keyword:Semantik
Page Number:46
Source:http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/mitarb/homepage/bierwisch/papiere/9_Bierwisch_2004_BECOME.pdf ; Manfred Bierwisch: BECOME and its Presuppositions. Ms. - Berlin: Humboldt-Universität, 2004
HeBIS-PPN:219406928
Dewey Decimal Classification:4 Sprache / 40 Sprache / 400 Sprache
Sammlungen:Linguistik
Licence (German):License LogoDeutsches Urheberrecht