Presupposition in Time Magazine’s Opinion Column

ABSTRACT

Language is a wonderfully rich vehicle for communication. It is used to convey wishes and commands, to tell truths and lies, to influence our hearer, to vent our emotion, and to formulate ideas which could probably never arise if we had no language. People use language to communicate with other persons. To communicate means to transfer ideas from one person to the others. If people do not have a tool to communicate, every person’s activities and interaction would be stagnant.

This research is focused on analyzing what presuppositions and how the presupposition is used in Time magazine’s opinion Column. The researcher uses descriptive qualitative research because the researcher effort to analyze and discuss the sentence or utterance which performs presupposition. The researcher uses Yule’s theory in analyzing presuppositions in this research. In the data analysis, the researcher did some processes of analysis, they are: (1) categorizing the data based on presupposition (2) analyzing the data and interpreting the data, and (3) making conclusion from the analysis.

There are two kinds of language, spoken language and written language. Spoken language is an utterance, which is formed from sound, such as conversation, speech, storytelling, discussion, television broadcasting, and etcetera. While, written language is an utterance which is formed in the written form, such as novels, comics, newspaper, magazines, letters, books, journals, articles, and etcetera. When people are communicating, they are sharing similar background of knowledge. It means that people are accustomed to share intended information with others. Common ground of knowledge is also involved in characterization of presupposition

After analyzing the data, the researcher found twenty eight data which are appropriate with the characteristics of presuppositions. They consist of existential presupposition, factive presupposition, lexical presupposition, structural presupposition. The existential presuppositions used in opinion column of Time magazine convey an assumption that someone or something, identified by the use of a noun phrase, does exist. Based on the analysis the factive presupposition is an assumption that information stated after certain words. In other words, it is the assumption that something is true due to the presence of some verbs such as "know" and "realize" and of phrases involving glad, for example. In lexical presupposition, the use of one form with its asserted meaning is conventionally interpreted with the presupposition that another (non-asserted) meaning is understood. Meanwhile, structural presupposition conveys an assumption that part of a structure contains information being treated as already known. In this case, certain sentence structures have been analysed as conventionally and regularly presupposing that part of the structure is already assumed to be true.

Finally, after finishing this research, the researcher hopes that this research can give contribution to the researcher himself, to the readers, and to further researchers who conduct the same research. Furthermore, the researcher suggests the next researchers to study more complete research, especially in the same field.