The theatre and presuppositions

Abstract EN

Background belief or assumption about the world shared by the speaker and the addressee is widely used, especially in linguistics, pragmatics, logic and epistemology ; it is called presupposition.

The paper is divided into two parts.

The first part of this paper makes an excursion into different views on this concept.

The second part relates the concept to a specific art-the theatre and to its corresponding literary genre-drama.

There follows a discussion of some basic presuppositions that appear in the theatre and an exploration which shows the use of presuppositions as a means of understanding the workings of discourse in drama.

The data items come from Shakespeare and G.

B.

Shaw.