The Presupposition reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Jul-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Presupposition

In Pragmatics (Linguistics): Implicit assumptions about the world. They are required to make an utterance meaningful.

Do you want to do it again? (Presupposition: You have done it already, at least once.)

My wife is pregnant. (Presupposition: I have a wife.)

Much of the information that is exchanged in discourse happens in the form of presuppositions.

This differs from entailment and implication.

This is the "Presupposition" reference article from the English Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.