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clauses, subordinate clauses, and so on. Considered from this perspective, discourse is a multistratified system, and its hierarchical organization depends strictly on functional considerations, that is, it is a device for organizing the distribution of information. And we have said, this is a very general feature of discourse, displayed at different levels of textual organization and related to different grammatical structures. Presuppositions are just one of the linguistic devices that allows such a hierarchical distribution of meaning.
In accordance with that statement, let us assume that there is a presuppositional phenomenon when, in giving some information by using certain expressions (be they simple lexical items or sentences), one conveys at the same time two kinds of meaning which do not have the same status. In sentences such as (1) or (2)
(1) John stopped smoking.
(2) John returned to New York.
there are two items of information conveyed, respectively,
(1a) John does not smoke anymore.
(1b) John smoked before.
(2a) John went to New York.
(2b) John was in New York before.
These items do not belong to the same level of meaning. In an intuitive way we could say that (1b) and (2b), which are traditionally called the presuppositions of sentences (1) and (2), are not the focus of the communication, which is more about the fact that John does not smoke now or that John went to New York. This intuition is in fact brought out by the negation test, to which we will return later.
We suggest that presuppositions are part of the information given by a text, subject to a mutual agreement by both speaker and hearer, a kind of textual frame which determines the point of view from which the discourse will be developed. This textual frame constitutes the background of the text itself, which is distinct from other information that represents the foreground. In sentences carrying presuppositions, the background frame consists of the presupposed meaning of the sentence that both S and A should take for granted, while the asserted meaning constitutes the foreground information. From the perspective of a theory of

 
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