This book attempts to explore presupposition as one of the most influential pragmatic notions. It presents a detailed discussion of presupposition and its relation with philosophy, logic, syntax, Gricean theory, speech act theory as well as entailment. Moreover, the book endows with a detailed analysis of semantic conception and pragmatic characterization of presupposition. Various presupposition-triggers are studied with appropriate illustrations. Properties of presupposition such as defeasibility, detachability, behavior under negation and so on, are highlighted in this book. Apart from...

The book is a kind of discourse analysis. The author has applied Pragmatic concepts like Cooperative Principle, Conversational Implicature and Presupposition to the plays of Harold Pinter, as well as other discourses. It has been found that these concepts can be fruitfully utilized to analyze the absurd plays. These notions have proved really useful techniques to bring out the implied meaning from the seemingly meaningless dialogues in Pinter's plays. His plays are marked with failure of communication, non-communication, meaningless utterances as well as silences and pauses. Common reader of...