Presupposition Satisfaction

Abstract

In traditional pragmatic theories the notion of context plays two roles: (i) it should contain enough information about the conversational situation to determine what is expressed by a sentence; (ii) it should contain enough information about what the participants of the conversation commonly assume about the subject matter of the conversation to determine whether what is said by a speaker is appropriate or not. The central idea behind Stalnakerian pragmatics is that there is a single notion of context that plays both of these two roles, and that both kinds of information modeled by this single context change during a conversation in an interactive way. A context, modeled by a set of possibilities, represents that what is presupposed by the participants in a conversation.