John Cainoy

Reporters are expected to cover the following subtopics in detail:

• Core definition of presupposition and entailment, and how they differ.
• Presupposition triggers (e.g., “stop,” “again,” “even,” factive verbs, definite descriptions).
• Projection problem: how presuppositions survive under negation, questioning, and embedding.
• Accommodation: how hearers adjust context to accept presuppositions.
• Entailment tests and their relation to truth-conditional meaning.
• Differences between presupposition, entailment, and implicature.
• Presupposition in intercultural and multimodal contexts (e.g., advertising, political discourse).
• Research potential: How presupposition and entailment contribute to communication breakdowns or persuasion strategies.

• Define presupposition and entailment and explain their role in pragmatic and semantic analysis.
• Show how presuppositions are assumed background information, while entailments are truth-conditionally guaranteed.
• Highlight the diagnostic tests for identifying presuppositions and entailments.
• Discuss their importance in cross-cultural, multimodal, and digital discourse.

• Beaver, D. I., Geurts, B., & Denlinger, K. (2024). Presupposition. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2024). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2024/entries/presupposition/
• Geurts, B. (2016). Presupposition and Givenness. In Y. Huang (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Pragmatics (pp. 180–198). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199697960.013.21
• Levinson, S. C. (1983). Presupposition. In Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press.
• Stalnaker, R. (2022). Pragmatic Presupposition. In Context and Content: Essays on Intentionality in Speech and Thought. Oxford University Press.

• Presupposition
• Presupposition Trigger
• Projection
• Accommodation
• Entailment
• Truth Conditions
• Background Assumptions vs. Conversational Inferences
• Presupposition vs. Entailment vs. Implicature

• Presupposition tests: negation, questioning, embedding.
• Entailment tests: truth-preservation across contexts.
• Projection theory in dynamic semantics.
• Context update models for presupposition accommodation.

• Presupposition Trigger: “John stopped smoking.” → presupposes John once smoked.
• Projection: “Did John stop smoking?” still presupposes he smoked before.
• Entailment: “John killed Bill” entails “Bill is dead.”
• Contrast with Implicature: “Some students passed” (implicates not all, but does not entail it).
• Advertising: “Have you tried the new iPhone?” presupposes that there is a new iPhone.

• Are presuppositions universal, or culture-specific?
• Can presuppositions be manipulated for persuasive purposes?
• How can we clearly distinguish between presupposition, entailment, and implicature?

• Presupposition triggers in political debates and media framing.
• Cross-cultural study of presupposition use in advertising.
• Experimental research on how presuppositions affect comprehension and persuasion.