Лекции по теоретической грамматике английского языка для студентов

semanticism
(pragmatics inside semantics – Searle), 
pragmaticism
(semantics inside pragmatics – Austin) and 
complementarism
(semantics and 
pragmatics complement each other, but are otherwise independent areas of 
research – Leech).
2. Indirect Meaning of the Utterance 
When there is a mismatch between the expressed meaning and the implied 
meaning we deal with indirectness. Indirectness is a universal phenomenon: it 
occurs in all natural languages. 
There can be three types of indirect meanings conveyed by a sentence: 
presupposition, implication and reference.
Presupposition 
Presupposition
is defined as an indirect proposition that can be inferred 
from the sentence.
The notion of presupposition has been borrowed from mathematical logic, 
according to which sentence S presupposes sentence S’ if sentence S’ can be 
inferred from sentence S and negating sentence S does not affect inferability of S’. 
Sentence S’ must be true, otherwise sentence S cannot be true.
e.g. 
John knows that Mary got married. John does not know that Mary got 
married.
presupposition: Mary got married. 
Do you want to do it again?
presupposition: You have done it already, at least once.
My wife is pregnant.
presupposition: The speaker has a wife. 
In linguistics, presupposition is a background belief, relating to an utterance, 
that must be mutually known or assumed by the speaker and addressee for the 
utterance to be considered appropriate in context and will generally remain a 
necessary assumption whether the utterance is placed in the form of an assertion, 
denial, or question. Presupposition has to do with informational status. The 

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information contained in a presupposition is backgrounded, taken for granted, 
presented as something that is not currently an issue. 
It is important to remember that 
negation
of an expression does not change 
its presuppositions: 
I want to do it again
and 
I don't want to do it again
both mean 
that the subject has done it already one or more times; 
My wife is pregnant
and 
My 
wife is not pregnant
both mean that the subject has a wife. In this respect, 
presupposition is distinguished from 
implication
.
So, presupposition as a linguistic phenomenon is characterized by two 
features, that is,
1) it can be inferred from the sentence;
2) it does not depend on negation or questioning.
Another feature characteristic of presupposition is pragmaticism, that is, the 
content of presupposition is pragmatic since presupposition reflects the author’s 
attitude towards what is stated or asked in the sentence.
So, presupposition possesses the following features: indirectness, 
inferability, independence of negation and pragmaticism of contents. Since the first 
three features do not allow any differentiation, it seems logical to classify 
presuppositions according to their pragmatic contents.
Factive presupposition (factiveness) 
e.g. 
John knows that Mary got married. John thinks that Mary got married
. 
Despite the identical external structure, semantically the two sentences are 
different. The difference lies in the author’s attitude towards what is said in the 
clause dependent on the predicate. In the first case, the author regards the 
proposition 
Mary got married
as a fact, which cannot be said about the proposition 
in the second sentence. The presuppositional contents contained in these two 
sentences is called factive presupposition, or factiveness. Predicates forming this 
type of presupposition are referred to as factive as well as words or word 
combinations expressing such predicates.
Factive words include such verbs as 
to admit, to amuse, to bother, to 
confess, to discover, to ignore, know, to realise, to regret, etc., 
adjectives 
glad, 

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exciting, important, lucky, proud, regrettable, remarkable. 
The verbs 
to assume, to 
believe, to imagine, to seem, to think
and adjectives 
certain, eager, likely, possible, 
sure
are non-factive.
Factiveness as any other type of presupposition is important in the study of 
English syntax as a factor influencing the syntactic form of the sentence and 
determining the construction’s transformation potential. For example, Complex 
Object with the infinitive can be used only after non-factive verbs of mental 
activity.
Emotiveness 
An emotive predicate expresses a subject emotional attitude of the author 
towards what is being said that can be defined as corresponding or non-
corresponding to the speaker’s desires and expectations.
e.g. 
John knows that Mary got married. John regrets that Mary got married.
Emotive verbs include such verbs as 
to bother, to regret, to resent, to dislike, 
to hate, etc. 
Emotive predicates have some syntactic peculiarities that are absent in non-
emotive ones, for example, emotive verbs can be modified by the adverb 
much
while non-emotive verbs cannot.
So, the notion of presupposition allows systematizing and explaining some 
semantic and syntactic peculiarities.
Implication and Inference 
Presupposition is not the only type of indirect sentence meaning. Consider 
the following example: 
e.g. She somehow contrived to pass the exam.
The implied meaning of the sentence is that she passed the exam. However, 
it differs from presupposition as it is negation-sensitive. An indirect proposition 
inferred from the original utterance and dependent on negation is called