ABSTRACT
In Chapter 1 we touched briefly on the notion of presupposition: the information in one sentence, for example, Andy Murfee usually drives his Honda to work, presupposes the existence of a referent, Andy Murfee, and certain predications, the facts that he works, owns a Honda, and knows how to drive it. The present chapter explores the notion of presupposition further, considering the notions of existence, possession, and occurrence. One means of conveying such presuppositions is the factive predicate, the topic of Section 9.1. Other predicates imply, rather than presuppose, the truth of some proposition; they are studied in Section 9.2. Sentences often contain information about the necessity, possibility, or probability of one or another proposition. This kind of information is called modality.
