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Presuppositions
In collaboration with Patrizia Violi
1. Introduction: The Problem of Presuppositions
Despite numerous analyses developed in linguistic circles in recent years the notion of presupposition continues to be one of the most problematic within linguistic investigation. 1 The difficulty in dealing with presuppositions seems to arise at two different levels: on the one hand, the delimitation of the objects under investigation; on the other, the different explanations of the phenomenon.
In regard to the problem of delimitation, presupposition seems to be a "fuzzy" category, or an umbrella term covering assorted semiotic phenomena. In ordinary language the usage of the word "presupposition" is much broader than in the technical sense. The technical concept of presupposition is restricted to certain kinds of inferences or assumptions, which are characteristically built into linguistic expressions and linked to some specific formal features. Moreover, they can be isolated using a specific linguistic test (traditionally, the negation test). However, even if this first distinction between ordinary and technical usage of the word delimits the domain of application, excluding all inferences and implicatures depending on general world knowledge and co-textual information (see below), the precise definition of the problem is far from clear. In the literature, a large number of syntactic structures and lexical items have been associated with presuppositional phenomena:
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Originally published as "Instructional Semantics for Presuppositions," Semiotica 64, 1/2 (1987):139.

 
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