Showing posts with label presupposition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label presupposition. Show all posts

Thursday, March 01, 2007

Pär Segerdahl, Language Use, Chapter 16, "Presuppositions and Methods of Linguistics"

Explaining failures of use by way of presupposition failure is to mistake a linguistic form of description for actual use. Talk of presuppositions makes sense only against a background of normal use. We should aim for a careful description of linguistic practice, not an explanation of it.