Existential Presupposition in Religious Islamic Texts: Pragmatic Implications.

Abstract

In modern Linguistics, pragmatics has come to be applied to the study of language from the point of view of the users, especially, of the choices they make, the constraints they encounter in using language in social interaction, and the effects their use of language has on the other participants in an act of communication.

   The main aim of pragmatic theory is to explain how successful communication is possible, and in particular, how utterances are understood. Understanding an utterance involves recovering the proposition it expresses and drawing certain inferences based on this proposition as premise. As regards the context, it is restricted to the mutual knowledge, beliefs and suppositions of speaker and hearer, where mutual knowledge is knowledge that is not only shared, and known to be known to be shared, and so on (Smith 1982: 61 and Kutz 1997:4).

  Presupposition is a central topic in pragmatics. The interpretation of presupposed information is context- dependent. It describes any kind of background assumption against which an action, theory, expression or utterance makes sense or is rational (Levinson 1983: 168; Crystal 1991: 271; and Verschueren 1999: 27).

     The term presupposition has been used to cover a very broad category of semantic and pragmatic phenomena that have an essential bearing on the understanding of utterances. More specifically, this term refers to propositions whose truth is taken for granted in an utterance and without which the utterance can not be assigned a truth- value, and that can generally be associated with a specific lexical item or grammatical features in the utterance.

    However, since pragmatics is so important in identifying the boundaries of lexical and sentential meaning, it is necessary to establish how existential presupposition operates in English religious texts and how it can be identified. This is the task the present paper is undertaking.