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background information represented by (6a) and (7a), then A must challenge the right S had to use the expressions (6) and (7). This requires some textual effort, as we shall show. In other words, sentences such as (6) and (7) have what we call a positional power, that is, the power to impose certain presuppositions. To say that the sentences have a positional power is, nevertheless, an oversimplication. In fact, it is not the sentence that has positional power, but the utterance of the sentence by a speaker. The sentence in itself has only a presuppositional power, but, from the moment in which it is inserted in a given context, the positional power is actualized, and the presuppositions become part of the context. That is, they form part of the mutual agreement by the participants on the interactions of the discourse.
The distinction between presuppositional and positional power enables us to overcome the "traditional" pragmatic view of presuppositions as felicity conditions or preconditions to be satisfied for the pragmatic appropriateness of sentences. According to this position, a precondition for the use of a verb such as accuse would be a previous negative statement on the action at issue, or an agreement of both S and A on a negative judgment. But we have seen in example (6) that we can easily use a sentence with the p-term accuse in order to inject into the context a negative assumption which does not need to be taken as a precondition. It could even be a "false" assumption in a given context; it is the use of the p-term accuse that sets it as "true.''
To consider presuppositions only as preconditions to be satisfied means to ignore the power presuppositions have to create a new context. Pragmatic theory disregards this power because of its reductive manner of considering the relationship between word and context, seen as a one way relationship:
context 23167-0232a.gif word
According to this perspective, it is the previous context which constrains lexical choices and selects appropriate words, defining their conditions of use. But often the relationship should be considered in the opposite way:
word 23167-0232a.gif context
It is the word which sets and defines the context. Therefore, the relationship between word and context is two-way, from context to word and from word to context. In other terms, since every word activates, by

 
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