Presupposition: A Tool For Communication

Presupposition is used in pragmatics and semantics, particularly in discourseanalysis. Presupposition is nothing but assumptions about the context of an utterance or a sentence. But the assumptions may be sometimes mistaken. It is something which a speaker assumes to be the case before making an utterance. It has an important role in communication because communication would have been impossible if everything had to be defined or explained every time we spoke. That is why pragmatics concentrates on the study of presupposition. Depending on its association with words, phrases, structures, verbs and lexical items (like stop,start, again etc.), presupposition has been divided into various sections. A great philosopher, Frege has remarked a hundred years ago that presupposition is only partially understood and so it has been an important ground for the study of how semantics and pragmatics interact. Whatever it may be, but presupposition has been an interesting topic for new researchers, upcoming authors and for the students of English too.