Theories on Pragmatics Presuppositions

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a. Theories on Pragmatics Presuppositions

Pragmatics is a general study of how context influences the way sentences convey information Brown Yule 1983, p. 227. As stated in the previous chapter, presupposition is background believe of something. Presupposition is very generally defined as that which the speaker assumes to be true as opposed to what he asserts to be true Kempson, 1975 p. 54. This statement is supported by Stalnaker 1972 who says that presuppositions are what the speaker takes to be common background for the participants in the context. In a certain circumstance, both of the speaker and hearer have the same background knowledge or at least know about the thing being talked. Allan 2009 says both concepts of pragmatics and presupposition can be interpreted in unusual ways. On one side, not being very distant from the perceptive, the concept of presupposition as ‘background assumption’, the concept of presupposition which covers a wide range of heterogeneous phenomena. Presuppositions are generally discovered in such situations where some people were talking about something even though they do not know the truth or the existence of the thing itself. It is supported by McCawley 1981 who says that describing an approach to presupposition which was in fact originally framed in terms of semantic presupposition, but which developed in a natural way into an account of pragmatic presupposition which can be divorced entirely from considerations of truth value gaps. Filmore 1971 proposes an argument which supports that such sentences must be satisfied in order for a particular illocutionary act to be effectively performed. An alternative to use the truth values in characterizing what presuppositions are and what goes 31 wrong when a presupposition is not true is provided by the so called pragmatic analysis of presuppositions Allwood, Anderson, Dahl, 1977. For example the sentence Johnny has a motorcycle presupposes that Johnny, or the person mentioned in the sentence, has a motorcycle. But still, the people who talk about Johnny do not know the truth whether Johnny has a motorcycle or not. People should explain the suitability of what someone says not only in terms of what he believes and desires, but also to a certain extent in terms of what he presupposes Bauerle Zimmermann, 2010. This does not mean that people have to find the truth of anything they hear or read. Bauerle Zimmermann 2010 say that in the traditional pragmatics theories the notion of the context plays two roles. The first one, it should contain enough information about the conversational situation to determine what is expressed by a sentence. The second one, it should contain enough information about what the participants of the conversation commonly assume about the subject matter of the conversation to determine whether what is said by a speaker is appropriate or not. There are several features which are claimed to define presuppositions and to delimit them from other forms of assumption Hickey, 1998, p. 117. The first one is that they remain constant under negation. The second one is that they are ‘defeasible’ which according to Levinson 1983 they cannot be cancelled out by either the immediate linguistics context or by some wider context of discourse. The last feature is that they are tied to particular aspects of the surface structure of an utterance. In the term of presuppositions, context cannot be neglected. 32 The researcher chooses pragmatics presuppositions because the researcher would like to figure out what types of presupposition discovered in some countries and states slogans in this world. Pragmatics presuppositions are best depicted as a relation between a speaker and the suitability of a sentence in a context Levinson, 1983, p. 177. In the pragmatics view of presupposition, the distinction is usually drawn not between presupposition and entailment, but between presupposition and assertion, where presupposition is the part of the content of an utterance which is treated as if it is familiar, and assertion is that part which is treated as if unfamiliar, new, or informative Leech, 1974 p. 287.

b. Types of Presuppositions