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Page 236
tive intercourse. The counterexamples (8), (10), and (11), as well as their reformulations, (8a), (10a), and (11a), should be more exactly translated as "What you have said is untrue, because if it were true it should impose on the discourse a background knowledge that I do not accept as true; therefore, you had no right to use the expressions you used in order to posit such a background knowledge" (happily normal people are less verbose). If we better analyze the counterexamples furnished by current literature, we see that they are dominated by a curious error, that is, by the confusion between the presuppositional power of the p-term or sentences and the way in which they are actually uttered in discursive strategies in order to exploit, maybe deceitfully, their power. 5
In summary, we can say that the two levels of meaning we have defined as background and foreground have a different status as regards negation. The foreground represents "information that is open to challenge," and the background, "information that is shielded from challenge by the hearer" (Givon 1982). To say that the background information is "shielded from challenge" does not mean that it cannot be challenged; the Addressee may, of course, challenge anything in discourse. We are talking about a tendency of use, not a grammatical rule. The presupposed content of a presuppositional construction, given its background nature, is less likely to be challenged in an inherently pragmatic scale of probabilities. To put information in the background position makes the challenge less "natural"; for this reason, a challenge at the presuppositional level gives rise to specific textual strategies, affecting the level of topic continuity in discourse.
Thus presuppositions are characterized by two different features: first, they are tied to particular aspects of surface structure; second, they are context-sensitive, since they can be challenged under given textual conditions. This double nature of presuppositional phenomena requires an integration between two levels of explanation: the semantic and the textual. On the one hand, presuppositions activated by p-terms need to be accounted for at the level of the semantic description, since they are encoded in the system of signification of a given language; on the other hand, they are linked to textual strategies and discourse constraints. Their context-sensitive nature can also explain the so-called projection problem, that is, the inheritance of presuppositions in complex sentences. Without analyzing this problem here, we suggest that it should be framed in a more general textual approach instead of through classification of different classes of predicates (filter, plugs, holes, and so on). Presuppositions are context-sensitive constructions; therefore, it is in context that the elements able to block presuppositions have to be

 
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