A Study of The Presupposition of Goods Advertisements in The Jakarta Post

ABSTRACT

Presupposition is what a speaker assumes is true or is known by the hearer. Presupposition can be encountered in any context of communication including in advertisement as a means of communicating the advertiser‟s ideas toward audience. Presupposition is widely used in advertising since advertisers cannot directly state that their products are of better quality than those of their competitors, but they possibly make indirect assertions via presupposition.

Advertisement, especially goods advertisement, was selected as data source of this research for several reasons; first, advertisement is a form of written communication that develops at the same time with the advance of technology, whether in oral or written ways. Second, in linguistic study, advertisement in newspaper is included into transactional discourse since its stress is on the expression of message from an advertiser to consumers. Third, the language of advertisement, which is compact and persuasive, is different from most of the other language used in every day life, i.e. the language is discrete.

The descriptive-qualitative was used as the method design of this research since the data are in the form of words or utterances rather than numbers. The data were taken from The Jakarta Post published from 1st to 31st of March 2007. The number of the analyzed data was 10. The researcher chose these data because they represented the whole one-month of goods advertisement. The researcher himself became the research instrument in the process of data collection and data analysis. The data were described descriptively based on presupposition theory of Levinson and George Yule using discourse analysis approach.

Thus, this study was aimed at identifying the presupposition and finding out the types of presupposition of goods advertisement in The Jakarta Post. To achieve the above objectives, the data analysis was handled in several steps. The researcher firstly identified the presupposition in the utterance of goods advertisement in The Jakarta Post based on the common ground and its triggers. Then, the researcher tried to confirm the presupposition identified. To confirm the presupposition, the researcher tested its nature that was constancy under negation. To accomplish this confirmation, the utterance was negated. When the former presupposition was maintained, the presupposition thus was confirmed. But when it failed, it then would not be included into presupposition. After that, the researcher found out the type of presupposition based on the characteristics indicated. Finally, the researcher made some conclusions of the discussion

Based on the researcher‟s analysis, the researcher concluded that most goods advertisements presupposed the existence of something. It seemed that the advertiser‟s choice to intensify the use of the existential presupposition was supported with his purpose to emphasize and implant the existence of an object being offered on the readers‟ or addresses‟ mind and to ease the addressees in understanding the content of the advertisement.