‘Take some more tea,’ the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.‘I’ve had nothing yet,’ Alice replied in an offended tone,’ so I can’t take more.’

Alice in Wonderland, ch. VII

With her reply, Alice rejects something that her interlocutor seems to take for granted. Ever since Frege’s and Russell’s classical works on meaning and reference, such presuppositions have been a major theme in 20th century philosophy of language, with the existence and uniqueness expressed by definite descriptions like the King of France in focus. With the development of formal semantics in the 1970s, linguists have started to systematically explore this rich and pervasive phenomenon and particularly the way in which presuppositions depend on their environment. Although the role of context-dependence for their understanding has long been recognized, only the more sophisticated models of meaning representation such as Discourse Representation Theory, founded by Hans Kamp around 1980, opened the opportunity to account for their behaviour adequately and in full detail. The 10 studies collected in this volume, authored by some of the leading experts in the field, give a live view of the current state of the art of presupposition analysis and should therefore be of great value to anybody interested in the field of natural language semantics and cognition.