A Cognitive Analysis Of The Defeasibility Of Presupposition

At the end of19th century, German philosopher and mathematician Frege proposed the term ’presupposition’, which attracted many scholars’ attention. It mainly refers to the reference and truth-value in philosophical field. On the basis of philosophical research, scholars investigate presupposition in semantic domain. The semantic presupposition is established on the truth-value of sentences or proposition that keeps constant under negation. Due to the unsatisfactory explanations of the semantic presupposition, linguists try to use another way to solve the problems, that is pragmatics. Pragmatic presupposition stresses on the relationship between speaker and the statement they made rather than sentence or proposition. A series of theories are proposed to deal with pragmatic presupposition.With the development of cognitive science and the rise of cognitive linguistics, cognitive linguists begin to investigate presupposition and propose new points. From their perspectives, presupposition is language users’idealized and unified interpretation and viewed as the information of people’s previous cognitive model. Presupposition is a shared cognitive environment, which is constituted by the Idealized Cognitive Mode (ICM) and encyclopedic knowledge activated by presupposition triggers. What’s more, the sentence is divided into two parts:the presupposition part and asserted part. The former one serves as ground foil to the figure, whereas the asserted is figure. In this paper, the author try to explain the defeasibility of presupposition according to Idealized Cognitive Mode (ICM) and figure-ground theory. The presupposition which is trigged by the Idealized Cognitive Mode (ICM) of presupposition-triggers sometimes can not apply to specific situation, which is shared cognitive environment. Meanwhile, potential figure-ground relationship will fail, and lead to the disappearance of the potential presupposition. The specific situation includes encyclopedic knowledge, the negation of different Idealized Cognitive Mode (ICM)-within Idealized Cognitive Mode (ICM) negation and cross Idealized Cognitive Mode (ICM) negation and some presupposition filters. With the new theoretical frame for the presupposition, we successfully interpret the disappearance of presupposition.