PRESUPPOSITION

This is a very long post (which I was trying to avoid) but I was hoping I could explain what I sort of introduced at the end of a previous post called SPEECH ACT THEORY in The Big Bang Theory.

Presuppositions are implicit assumptions about the world or background belief relating to an utterance whose truth is taken for granted. “I'm doing the dishes now” implies that the speaker, he or she, must have dirty dishes Any listener assumes it to be true. It refers to common knowledge. It's usually shared by the different participants involved in the speech act. You can also put the same sentence into a negative one, but the presupposition would still be the same.

There are six “major” types. Though I have read there are many more, for the purpose of this entry I will only list these six.
1. Existential Presupposition: By saying “Give me the glass, please”, the speaker is basically saying that the mentioned glass does exist.
2. Factive Presupposition: Can be used with verbs such as “regret”, “know”, “realize”, “be aware of” and so on. “He regrets stealing the bike” presupposes that he (whoever he is) stole a bike.
3. Non-factive Presupposition: Presupposes the non-truth of the fact. “She pretended to be rich”. If she was rich, she wouldn't have needed to pretend being rich.
4. Lexical Presupposition: Presupposes something that is not explicitly said. By saying “Tom escaped”, the speaker implies that Tom tried to escape and finally succeeded. The speaker is understood without explicitly saying that Tom had been trying to escape before succeding. Words such as “still”, “again”, “continue”, or “no more/any more/no longer” give listeners hints: “The King is still ruling the country” → The King ruled the country before.
5. Structural Presupposition: Is mainly used with “wh-” words. By asking “When did your dog die?” a listener knows immediately that the dog died. There is no answer needed to presuppose this fact. “How many years have you been living in Spain” makes the listener presuppose that you (i.e. the addressee of the question) has been living in Spain in the past.
6. Counterfactual Presupposition: What is presupposed is not only not true but it is the opposite of what is said that is true. “If I weren't poor” means, then, that the speaker actually is ill. “I wish I had called him” → The speaker did not call him.

In order to draw these conclusions for ourselves in our everyday life, we use unconsciously a “tool” called Entailment, which helps us to get to a logical consequence when we hear or read sentences. The utterance “Tom has been caught by the police” entails the truth of another one. Firstly, the presupposition would be that Tom escaped (if not, the police wouldn't be trying to catch him, for example). And secondly, the entailment would be that he is no longer free (if we imagine that he escaped temporarily from jail), that he is under arrest.

Finally, we must also know what an Implicature is: we usually talk in order to successfully communicate and thus, cooperate each other with our interlocutors -that is, we contribute to build up information and the understanding of it. If someone asks you “Have you passed your Literature exam?” and you answer “My brother has a new girlfriend” there is no cooperation whatsoever in trying to maintain a coherent conversation. Hence, there is no implicature. If a speaker uses implicatures and the listener recognizes them, we speak of an inference.

Well, now we may apply this to what Leonard said to Sheldon in the Episode about the sarcasm sign. This was the conversation they had in the kitchen:
- "For God's sake, Sheldon. Do I have to pull out a sarcasm sign everytime I open my mouth?" As usual, Sheldon doesn't get the point and asks
- "You have a sarcasm sign?!" And, again, as usual, Leonard put on his I-can't-believe-this-face and answers:
- “No, I do not have a sarcasm sign”.

What I wanted to explain in this post is that Sheldon, in his linguistic/interactive etc. etc. clumsiness again does not understand irony, sarcasm because of his lack of understanding indirect speech acts and this way takes Leonards “rhetoric question” literally. Usually, “normal people” understand the difference between saying “a sarcasm sign” and “the sarcasm sign”*. Is is the latter example, the definite noun phrase, that linguistically "assures" the existence of whatever is named after it. But again, Sheldon doesn't work well with implicatures, entailments, inferences, which are all related to speech acts.

*Think about it. Usually, when actually have that X, when we speak with someone who also knows of the existence of it, we would say “the X”. If many Xs exist, but we do not own one, we use “a X”. As in “I might buy a car soon”. Whereas, if a friend forgot something in your car you would say “Have a look in the car”.