Abstract

This paper aims at showing how pragmatics, today a discipline developing in close connection with cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, provides new ways to envisage Discourse Analysis. In this article, we first discuss the relationship between pragmatics and Discourse Analysis, focusing on the links between the process of utterance understanding, which is in the scope of pragmatic theories, and consenting to beliefs, which is in the scope of Discourse Analysis. Next, we introduce an extended notion of presuppositions which we name discursive presuppositions, which are unexpressed contents but nonetheless propositions that need to be incorporated in the background and thus consented to in order to provide not meaning proper but relevance to the utterance. Last section is dedicated to the examination of two examples where discursive presuppositions are exploited in persuasiveness.