{"id":2008,"date":"2024-07-20T14:41:48","date_gmt":"2024-07-20T18:41:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/?p=2008"},"modified":"2024-07-20T14:43:06","modified_gmt":"2024-07-20T18:43:06","slug":"presupposition-recognize","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/presupposition-recognize\/","title":{"rendered":"The presupposition of “recognize”"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s an interesting pragmatics thing going on in the official statement ex-first lady Melania Trump put out after her husband was grazed by a sniper’s bullet. (The full statement is here<\/a> if you care; it’s not very interesting overall.) However I was drawn to an interesting violation of presupposition in the document:<\/p>\n

A monster who recognized my husband as an inhuman political machine attempted to ring out Donald’s passion – his laughter, ingenuity, love of music, and inspiration.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A few things are going on here; let me put aside the awkward non-parallelism of laughter<\/em> vs. love<\/em> of music<\/em> vs. ingenuity<\/em> and inspiration <\/em>and note that the verb she wants in the embedded clause is wring\u00a0out<\/em> (figuratively, to extract by means of forceful action) not ring out<\/em>. But the more interesting one is the use of recognized<\/em>. To say that the shooter recognized<\/em> Donald Trump as an inhuman machine presupposes that the speaker agrees with this assessment; or perhaps more generally that it is in the common ground that Donald Trump is an inhuman machine, at least in my idiolect. There is nothing in the text or subtext of the statement suggesting she views her husband as a monster, despite the long and tedious tradition of trying to “read resistance” into the wives of right-wing American politicians. For me verbs like misconstrued<\/em> or mistook<\/em> presupposes the opposite, that the speaker and\/or common ground disagrees with this assessment, and that’s what I suppose Mrs. Trump meant to say here. I don’t blame Mrs. Trump for this; English is not her first language, though she speaks it quite well. But she’s famous and rich enough that she ought to employ a PR professional or lawyer to proof-read public statements like I’m sure Mrs. Obama or Mrs. Bush do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s an interesting pragmatics thing going on in the official statement ex-first lady Melania Trump put out after her husband was grazed by a sniper’s bullet. (The full statement is here if you care; it’s not very interesting overall.) However I was drawn to an interesting violation of presupposition in the document: A monster who … Continue reading “The presupposition of “recognize””<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-aside","hentry","category-politics","post_format-post-format-aside"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2008","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2008"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2008\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2012,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2008\/revisions\/2012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}