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(12) I did not manage to take the train |
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does not deny the presupposition, namely, that the subject wanted to do something difficult. |
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Such a representation cannot predict co-textual strategies based on the violation of the rule but can help to understand in what sense certain phenomena of a pragmatics of communication take place. Let us suppose that a mother warns her son not to play with his ball because he could break the window. The boy does not pay attention to his mother's recommendation and in the end does break the window. The mother says: You finally managed to break it! If the boy were endowed with sophisticated semantic competence and with metalinguistic skill, he could tell his mother that she is infelicitously using the verb to manage since what it presupposes was not the case (namely, the boy did not try to break the window and the deed was not so difficult). Usually the strategy of the mother succeeds, because by uttering her sentence she posits the presupposition as if were to be taken for granted and she makes her child feel guilty. By using a p-term (when it was not felicitous to do so), she, by her prelocutory strategy, obliges the child to accept the p-term as felicitously uttered and therefore engages him in taking for granted the whole of the presuppositions the term postulated. |
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If such a strategy looks too sadistic (but Bateson would not say so), let us consider a normal case of witticism. John says: Smith loved my paper. Tom says: Oh, I sympathize with you. . . . Either John replies that sympathize presupposes that the addressee underwent a misfortune, and cannot be used in that case, or John accepts the rhetorical strategy of Tom and understands that he was implicating that Smith is stupid. The implicature succeeds because it posits as communicationally unquestionable a presupposition that the signification system had registered as unquestionable in all the cases in which a given p-term was used felicitously. |
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2.7. Background Knowledge |
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As for background knowledgeso strongly advocatcd by Bar-Hillel as a pragmatic phenomenonundoubtedly there are cases of textual interpretation where the idiolectal world knowledge of the addressee cannot be foreseen by any semantic representation. Take the case of irony as a sort of implicature: in order to guarantee the communicative success of an ironic statement p, the Sender must assume that the Addressee knows that p is not the case. This is a typical instance of a communicative phenomenon that no semantic theory can keep under |
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