should be sensitive to the level of knowledge and sophistication of children as decision makers. The guidelines also urge advertisers to make a constructive
contribution to the social development of children by emphasizing positive social standards in advertising, such as friendship, kindness, honesty, and generosity.
Similarly, the major television networks have set their own guidelines for advertising aimed at children. The guidelines restrict the use of celebrities,
prohibit exhortive language such as “Go ask Dad”, and restrict the use of animation to one-third of the total time of the commercial.
4. Theories on Presupposition
Under the field of pragmatics, presupposition is an interesting topic to deal with. Pragmatics, which is “the general study of how context influences the way
sentences convey information” Brown, 1983: 227, gives a vast space for presupposition to us to study. Although pragmatics, presupposition particularly,
becomes an additional topic in the subject of Semantics when the writer was in semester 6, the writer is attracted to explore further about presupposition and do a
study on it.
a. What is Presupposition?
When we discuss about presupposition, we will discuss about pragmatics. Pragmatics deals with linguistic performance. It is the way people’s use of
language in contexts. Context, according to ideaPivot.com, is the environment or situation in which something exists or occurs. The human mind uses context to
manage a massive amount of information from a myriad of different situations, PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
such as work, family, friends, and community. Using context, people quickly decipher what information is relevant in a given situation. As people, we can
recognize the contexts we are in, know what information is applicable to each context, and derive information from each context. For an instance, if a customer
in a computer store says burner, the store clerk will take the customer to the CD and DVD recorder section. Stove burners, Bunsen burners, and wood burners are
all out of the dialogue for the interaction is in the context of a computer store. In the term of presupposition, context cannot be neglected. Presupposition
is the requirements that the context must satisfy so the utterance can be interpreted at all. It has the different territory with assertion. Assertion is the claims that are
made, based on the context. Some linguists term presupposition as the “implicit assumptions about the
real world, and the sense of the utterance may depend on those assumptions” Fromkin et al., 2003: 216. It means that presupposition is a background belief
that the speaker shares to the listener. It is something that sits, unsaid, and helps provide meaning about what a person says. When a person says something –
makes an utterance– the meaning of that sentence has to do with the words, but the meaning only exists within the context of what else is in the persons head that
provides meaning. When two people are trying to communicate, and their presuppositions are
not known to each other, thats when misunderstanding takes place. Consider the sentence below: Would you have another coke? This sentence presupposes or
implies that you have already had at least one glass bottle can of coke. Part of the PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
