The pragmatic analysis of presuppositional phenomena in levinson's pragmatics 1

Abstract

Summary In the following paper I discuss Stephen Levinson's contribution to the development of a pragmatic theory of presupposition, which he presents in Pragmatics (1983). I argue that his perspective is insufficiently sensitive to the implications of drawing on context, and so not properly pragmatic at all. In addition to discussion centred on Levinson's own linguistic examples, I conclude with a tentative and informal analysis of some ‘live’ data taken from a British...