Presupposition and implicitness in the 20th century

In the 1970s, when linguists began to inventory the various forms of presupposition in natural languages, they classified them under the heading of implicitness. With this classification, linguists carried out a profound shift in the analysis of presupposition that began with Frege in 1892. We propose to study the historical process that goes from the logical approach of early analytical philosophy to the first linguistic theories that included presupposition in the field of implicitness (Fillmore, Ducrot, Stalnaker). This analysis, which will show a lack of consensus, leads us to establish a correlation between each theory’s criteria for implicitness and each one’s specific way of explaining presupposition.

• Affiliations: 1: Université Paris Diderot; 2: CNRS CURAPP-ESS, UMR 7319, Université de Picardie