Presupposition Scope of Pragmatics

the color they are talking about. B does not say that shehe does not like the color but shehe implies it. For another example: 8 A: “We’re going to the movie, are you going with us tonight?” B: “My parents’ are visiting tonight.” The context is that A and B are good friends and A knows that B rarely meets herhis parents who live out of the town. In 8, B’s answer is not related with the question of A, because there is not any relationship between the movie and B’s parents. However, since there is a shared knowledge between A and B, then B has actually answered A’s question. A knows that B seldom meets her parents living out of the town, so A must understand that B is not going with A because B must want to spend the night with herhis parents. B does not say that she is not going to the movie with the other, but she implies it.

3.2.4 Presupposition

Yule 1996: 133 states that presupposition is something the speaker assumes to be the case prior to making an utterance. Speakers, not sentences, have presuppositions. For example: 9 Where has Anne looked for the keys? Presupposition of 9: Anne has looked for the keys, but has not found it yet. 10 Do you want to do it again? Presupposition of 10: You have done it already, at least one time. 11 My wife is pregnant Universitas Sumatera Utara Presupposition of 11: The speaker has a wife. Presupposition are used to presuppose what want to be done or through while talking overtly about something else. The study of presupposition of the background assumptions made in the process of communication. Experts in these matters dreadfully keen to find out, for example, what kind of person would say ‘ The king of France is bald now’ when as everybody knows there is no such person, so the presuppositions of his existence can not hold. Presuppositions is a complicated and still debated by many experts in linguistics study. Presuppositions come from debated of many linguistics, especially about the reference of the utterance. Gohlob Frege 1982: 152 states that in every statement, there is always a presupposition that the names or the things are used have a reference. Russell, a linguist from England, gave a theory of the descriptions. Russell tries to find a sentence that have a meaning but not have a reference. Russell said: The King of France is bald now. This sentence did not have a reference or there is no the king of France now. There are several features which are claimed to define presuppositions and to delimit them from other forms of inference. The first is that they remain ‘constant under negation’ Kiparsky, 1971: 351. In other words, weather he say ‘she loves her job’ or ‘she doesn’t love her job’ does not alter the presupposition that ‘she has a job’ always assuming that the words ‘she’ and ‘her’ refer to the same person. The second features of presupposition is that they are ‘defeasible’ Levinson, 1983: 186, which means that they can be cancelled out by either the immediate linguistics context or by some wider context or mode of discourse. If we say ‘the Universitas Sumatera Utara committee failed to reach a decision’, it presupposes that they tried but we can cancel out that presupposition if we add because they did not even get round to discussing it. Similarly, we can argue presupposition out of the way by a variant on the reduction and absurb mode of discourse. Example: Mery didn’t do it and Andre didn’t do it. In fact that no body did it.

3.3 The Types of Presupposition