The perspective‐sensitivity of presuppositions

Abstract

Presuppositions are perspective-sensitive: they may be evaluated with respect to the beliefs of a salient protagonist. This happens not only in well-known cases of perspective shift such as free indirect discourse , but also when the perspective shift is less obvious, but still present, such as in examples of so-called protagonist projection (Holton 1997). In this paper I show that this simple observation explains many puzzling facts noted in connection with presuppositions over the last fifty years, concerning for example emotive and cognitive factives, temporal clauses and reason clauses.