On the Evidential Status of Presupposition and Assertion

Abstract

This work tackles the evidential behavior of presuppositions and assertions by assessing their socio-interactional function in communication. It is argued that by asserting and presupposing contents in an utterance, speakers encode a personal experience and a factual type of evidentiality, respectively, the former entailing a stronger involvement of the speaker as committed source of some information. By discussing how evidential meanings can also be pragmatically-inferred, the present paper proposes to recast the presupposition-assertion distinction as a further level of evidentiality marking.

Presupposition, assertion and the encoding of evidentiality in political discourse

“…In the framework adopted in this work, the presupposition-assertion dichotomy is taken to inhere in the domain of micropragmatics and, precisely, in the linguistic level known as Information Structure (Cresti 1987;Lambrecht 1994;Gundel/Fretheim 2004), referring to the way(s) in which sentence contents are distributed according to degrees of informational prominence. Integrated approaches to evidentiality and information structure are still at dawn (Faller 2002;Masia 2017aMasia , 2017b) and the present study is an attempt to contribute to existing contention with a further body of evidence from political communication, which might add grounds to current reflections on the evidential status of information units. In the view herein presented, presupposition and assertion hint at ISSN 1615-3014 132 different degrees of speaker commitment to the truth of a proposition, with presupposition signaling a weaker commitment than assertion.…”

Negotiating Implicit Meaning on the Internet: A Case Study

“…Triggers identification and quantification is applied to the interpretation of power exhibitions and attempts to influence the audience (mostly in political, journalistic or advertising texts) in a rich scientific literature in different languages (examples are, among others, Zare, Abbaspour, & Rajaee, 2012;Lombardi Vallauri & Masia, 2014;Drai &de Saussure, 2016 andYoussef &Albarakati, 2021). Much debate has also centered on the addressor"s commitment to truth when conveying the information with specific linguistic structures or pragmatic choices and on the epistemic status of the implicit content; in particular, presuppositions have been associated to a "concealment of responsibility" (Frege, 1892;Strawson, 1964;Grice, 1975, Givón, 1982Masia, 2017). Regarding the receiver"s side, some essays in cognitive psycholinguistics have explored how implicit contents are comprehended and neurologically processed (Langford & Holmes, 1979, Masia, Canal, Ricci, Lombardi Vallauri, & Bambini, 2017.…”