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Both concepts, 'pragmatic' and 'presupposition,' can be interpreted in different ways. Not being very remote from the intuitive, pretheoretical concept of pre- supposition as 'background assumption,' pre- supposition covers a wide range of heterogeneous phenomena. Because of the principle of com- municative economy, balanced by the principle of clarity (Horn 1984), in discourse much is left unsaid or taken for granted.
In order to clarify the concept of presupposition, some authors have compared speech with a Gestalt picture, in which it is possible to distinguish a ground and a figure. Presuppositions are the ground; what is actually said is the figure. As in a Gestalt picture, ground and figure are simultaneous in speech; unlike the two possible representations in the Gestalt picture, speech ground and figure have a different status, for instance with respect to the possibilities of refutation. What is said, i.e., the figure, is open to objection; what is assumed, i.e., the ground, is 'shielded from challenge' (Giv6n 1982:101). What restricts the anal- ogy is the fact that discourse is a dynamic process; the picture is not. So, there is a level of implicit com- munication. When communicating, one is constantly asked to choose what to put in the foreground and what in the background. Discourses and texts are therefore multilevel constructions. Presuppositions represent at least a part of the unsaid.
The label 'pragmatic' can be used in different ways: it may refer to a number of objects of study or to a number of methods of analysis, linked by the fact that they take elements of the actual context into account.
The origin of the concept of pragmatic pre- supposition lies in the recognition by philosophers of language and logicians that there are implicata of utterances which do not belong to the set of truth conditions. The starting point is their awareness that there are other relations between utterances besides that of entailment.
Definitions of pragmatic presupposition proposed in the 1970s have brought about a pragmatic re- reading of a problem which was above all logical and which had not found adequate explanation in the available semantic theories. This re-reading was basically methodological.
Since Stalnaker's definition (1970), a pragmatic pre- supposition has no longer been considered a relation between utterances, but rather between a speaker and a proposition. This is a good starting point, but it is far from satisfactory if the label 'pragmatic' is meant to cover more than 'semantic and idealized contextual features,' i.e., if one adopts a radical pragmatic stand- point.
A pragmatic presupposition might be provisionally defined as a 'menage a trois' between a speaker, the framework of his/her utterance, and an addressee. From a radical pragmatic standpoint, a substantivist view of presuppositions—what the presupposition of an utterance is—seems to be less promising than a functional, dynamic, interactional, contractual-nego- tiating view of how the presuppositional phenomena work in the communicative exchange. The pragmatic presupposition can be considered as an agreement between speakers. In this vein, Ducrot proposed a
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