NMTS-Group3

Warning:
The material on this page has been created as part of a seminar. It is still heavily under construction and we do not guarantee its correctness. If you have comments on this page or suggestions for improvement, please contact Manfred Sailer.
This note will be removed once the page has been carefully checked and integrated into the main part of this wiki.

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Presupposition (Group 3)

Members

• Katharina
• Caterina
• Daniela
• Eva

Short description of the topic

There are endless ways of communicating. It takes place through language, the appearance of a person, animals communicate, music has the power to communicate and of course literature and even plants communicate. Usually we take a lot of knowledge for granted, such as Germany has a female Bundeskanzler or even historical events that have become part of our cultural memory and are therefore taken as common knowledge. Due to our topic communication via language in will be the aim of our group. We will deal with a part of semantics that is called formal semantics. This is a branch of linguistics that approaches meaning using the notion of truth. For presuppositions truth /falsity is important in terms of the relation between sentences. This means that the truth or falsity of the second sentence (the presupposed sentence) is implied by the truth or falsity of the first sentence

Examples

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The truth of the second sentence is implied by the truth/falsity of the first sentence. If we know that the first sentence is not true, such as there isn‘t a king of France, bewilderment would be the reaction to such bold statement. A lot of times presuppositions are used where people are being manipulatet such as in commercials:

References and links

References

* Meyer, Paul Georg. 2002.Synchronic English Linguistics-An Introduction. Tübingen: Narr Studienbücher.
* Bieswanger, Markus.2010. Introduction to English Linguistics. Stuttgart: UTB- Verlag.

Links

• Presupposition

• Dr. Pelka, Bastian. 2007.Ein Mediawiki Handbuch von Einsteigern für Einsteiger. Institut für Journalistik und Kommunikationsforschung (IJK) der Hochschule für Musik und Theater. Hannover

Our e-learning objects

Our wiki pages

• Denotation (definition in Basic Glossary)
  

Our podcasts

<mediaplayer>http://youtu.be/YQJvOaMCUaw</mediaplayer>

<mediaplayer>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb8c7pEEEYg</mediaplayer>

Our materials for an interactive whiteboard

Presuppositions.notebook

Our pictures

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  Kitty, Katharina's cat

• 

  Dani's favorite sunset

• 

  Caterina's pet

• 

  Eva's dog

Our exercises

1. Presupposition or entailment?

You will now have to find out whether the sentence is a presupposition or an entailment.

Comment Sailer: The second sentences, i.e. the presuppositon or the entailment, is missing in your examples. - but it seems you are not done yet anyways. Is this correct?

1. Where is the man with the megaphone?.
2. Queen of England attended a cooking workshop.
3. My dog Richard was killed in a car accident.

Comment: I know you're still working on these exercises, but just as a first comment: the explanation for the last sentence is a bit confusing. Maybe you could re-write it so it becomes more clear.

2.The following sentences make certain presuppositions.  What are they?

1. Would you mind washing up the dishes this time? Presupposition: Click me
2. I want more milk for my tea! Presupposition: Click me

Comment Sailer:
1) ??? and ?? are very bad names for wiki pages. Please use longer and more mnemonic names - such as PresupposionEx2-1 or similar
2) In your example solution you should give more than just one presuppositions because the sentences have many presuppositions. Alternatively you could underline a particular word in the original sentence and ask for the presupposition(s) that are triggered by this word.

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