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More about shared schematic knowledge
Task D – Knowledge about language and of communicative conventions
Part 2 - Our answer
The problem is that the question involves a presupposition that you
have been beating your wife. If you answer YES, you will clearly be acknowledging
guilt, but if you choose the opposite answer, NO, you will still be acknowledging
guilt. This is because in order for a statement to be true or false all
of its presuppositions must be true. So, if you want to get out
of the bind that the question induces you need to avoid both ‘yes’
and ‘no’, and deny the question’s presupposition instead
(e.g. ‘I’ve never beaten my wife – she is bigger and
stronger than me, so I wouldn’t dare!’).
We can see, then, that our general schematic knowledge about the presuppositional
structure of sentences helps us to infer particular presuppositions which
are held by particular sentences even when they are not asserted (as in
the above example). Our schematic assumptions about the presuppositional
structure of sentences thus help us to infer what we called ‘the
meaning between the lines’ (as we called it in Topic 12 of this
course) of particular sentences others utter or write.
There are many kinds of presuppositions, and we do not have space to
go into them here in any detail. But it may be helpful for you to know
that ‘Have you stopped beating your wife’ contains a number
of other presuppositions. It presupposes that you have a wife, that you
and your wife both exist, and that you are male you’re your wife
is female. Note, then, that if you, the real reader of the sentence, happens
to be female and unmarried (which is the case for the large majority of
students taking Language and Style course), you have to pretend that you
are the ‘you’ of the sentence in order to do this task. This
is a one-sentence example of entering into a fictional world, something
you do much more extensively when you read novels and plays. For the duration
of reading or watching Shakespeare’s Macbeth, for example,
you pretend to yourself that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are the real king
and queen of Scotland, and so on.
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