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a sentence phenomenon, since the utterance of even the simplest sentence can presuppose all the world in this sense. Furthermore, in ongoing discourse, all of the earlier elements of a sequence are presupposed by the last sentence of the sequence. An utterance thus presupposes the informational content of what has preceded it. We will not be concerned here with this larger sense of presupposition, which has to be separated from sentence presupposition. From this point of view, we draw a distinction between speaker's presuppositions connected to the speaker's knowledge, including all the above phenomena, and sentence presuppositions, conveyed by a sentence itself. Here we are concerned only with the latter. We assume that, among all the phenomena which produce a background-foreground effect, it is possible to isolate a class of phenomena where the background-foreground distinction depends on sentence structure and/or meaning organization. In other words, there are specific linguistic constructions which are regularly associated with the background-foreground mechanism by virtue of their form or meaning, and these constructions are what we define as presuppositions. In particular, we will restrict our analysis to two kinds of presuppositions.
The first kind is presuppositions conveyed by lexical items, which will be called p-terms, whose presuppositional power depends on their intensional structure, that is, it is a part of their coded content, irrespective of the context in which they are used, and also when they are considered out of any context. All the examples of p-terms given here will be verbs, since verbs have up to now received a more consistent treatment in the current literature. We do not exclude the possibility of identifying other types of p-terms (for instance, connectors, adverbs, prepositions), but such are the limits of the present exploration.
The semantic description of p-terms is at once an account of semantic content and a description of the action to which the term refers. For example, if the p-term to stop has a given presupposition (that is, that the action was going on beforehand), the action of stopping can be performed only in a context in which something was being done before. This means that we understand the lexical item on the basis of the same schema in which we understand the action. 3
The second category is presuppositions depending on a process of communication in the course of which terms without coded presuppositional power are inserted into referring sentences. These presuppositions will be called existential. We shall study existential presuppositions concerning proper names and definite descriptions, as considered by Russell (1905) and Strawson (1950). In this sense proper

 
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