presupposing

Presupposing refers to the act of assuming something is true or part of the background knowledge when a statement is made. In linguistics and philosophy of language, a presupposition is the proposition that the speaker treats as given or taken for granted for the utterance to be meaningful or appropriate.

In practice, presuppositions are often embedded in sentences through certain triggers. Common triggers include change-of-state verbs (such as stop, continue, begin), definite descriptions, and factive verbs (know, realize). For example, the sentence “John stopped smoking” presupposes that John used to smoke. “The current king of France is bald” presupposes that there exists a current king of France. Presuppositions can also arise from definite noun phrases and other constructions that assume background conditions about the world.

A key feature in semantic theory is the distinction between presupposition and entailment. Presuppositions are background assumptions that can persist under negation or certain questions, a property known as projection. For instance, “John did not stop smoking” still carries the presupposition that John used to smoke. By contrast, entailments are commitments that arise from the asserted content and typically do not survive negation in the same way.

Applications of presupposition analysis appear across linguistics, philosophy of language, and pragmatics, informing how meaning is conveyed in discourse, how listeners infer unstated assumptions, and how speakers manage common ground in communication. The concept remains central to discussions of how language encodes shared background knowledge and how speakers influence interpretation.