Indirect Meaning of the Utterance

 
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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 

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