Abstract
The essence of language is human activity — activity on the part of one individual to make himself understood by another, and activity on the part of that other to understand what was in the mind of the first. These two individuals, the producer and the recipient of language, or as we may more conveniently call them, the speaker and the hearer, and their relations to one another, should never be lost sight of if we want to understand the nature of language and of that part of language which is dealt with in grammar (Jespersen, 1965, p. 17).
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Notes
As an example of a ‘culturally’ pragmatic definition of presupposition, see Keenan’s ‘Two Kinds of Presupposition in Natural Language’ (1971, p. 49).
On the other hand, Karttunen and Peters (1977) may be right in calling certain presuppositions ‘conventional implicatures’, particularly if conventional implicature is interpreted as being equivalent to literal meaning.
Keenan (1970) makes several similar points.
Allen (1966), Dowty (1972), Kittredge (1970), Palmer (1968), Prince (1974), etc.
This terminology is from Prince (1974).
This does not mean, however, that progressive constructions cannot occur in sentences with perfective main verbs. Comrie (1976, p. 23) gives the example, ‘It happened (perfective) one day that I was walking (imperfective) along the street...”
Kittredge (1970) makes just this claim calling start, begin, etc. ‘perfectivizers’.
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© 1979 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Freed, A.F. (1979). Methodology and Theoretical Assumptions. In: The Semantics of English Aspectual Complementation. Synthese Language Library, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9475-1_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9475-1_1
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