Presupposition analysis in advertisement articles of The Jakarta Post Newspaper

ABSTRACT

Pragmatic presupposition is treated as a felicity condition for implementing some speech act, which is necessary to the success of the speech act. Presupposition is used in advertising since the advertiser can not directly offers their services which are better than their competitors, but they possibly make indirect assertion through the presupposition.

Advertisement is one of human life activities to introduce their new products or services that can be found in some medias, like as radio, television, newspapers, magazines, or other sources. There are two categorizes of advertisement, goods and services. Service advertisement is selected as data source of this research for several reasons.

This research uses descriptive qualitative method. This is called descriptive research, since the data were descriptively analyzed based on Levinson and Yule (2000) theories using discourse analysis approach. This analysis only focused on advertisement article, especially in service advertisement from each edition of the Jakarta Post published from 1 up to 30 April 2009.

This research chooses the advertisement in media of The Jakarta Post newspaper to analyze, because it includes international newspaper. The language in The Jakarta Post is very clear and it uses basic words, so we can understand easily about its meaning and content.

Thus, this research was aimed at identifying the presupposition and finding out the types of presupposition of service advertisement in The Jakarta Post newspaper. To achieve the above objectives, the data analysis was handled in several steps. First, the data are categorized in accordance with presupposition, especially service advertisement that used presupposition type. Second, the data are discussed and interpreted from each category based on Levinson and Yule (2000) theories. Third, the data are presented descriptively to draw conclusion.

Finally, from the analysis it can be seen that service advertisement usually presupposes the existence of something or someone. It frequently uses existential presupposition. It seems that the advertiser’s choice to intensify the use of the existential presupposition is supported with his purpose to emphasize and implant the existence of an object offered to the customer.