Presuppositions used in John Grisham’s the client

ABSTRACT

Presupposition is the assumption which is made by the speaker as the background that presumed to be mutually known before the utterance or sentence ever occurred. This assumption is constant under negation when the negation test is done over the sentence. Since this assumption is true either in positive or negative sentence, it then can be said as non-controversial knowledge. This research of presupposition in John Grisham’s The Client is intended to answer the question that is how are presuppositions used in John Grisham’s The Client? Thus, this research describes some concepts of presuppositions applied within the conversation of The Client.

This research is designed by using qualitative descriptive approach in which the researcher describes the phenomena based on the theory of presupposition. This approach is also applied because the data of the research are the utterance of the conversation available in the novel and not the numbers. ,Therefore, to collect and to analyse the data, the instrument used is human instrument.

The data were taken from the beginning of the novel since it represents the main idea of the novel. There were 21 data that were analysed. These data were analysed by detecting their conversational background and the presupposition trigger. Then, to confirm the presupposition detected, the researcher tested it by using negation test which was accomplished by testing its constancy under negation. In the final analysis, the presupposition was categorized into the type of presupposition.

The result of this research shows that when people are interrogating, they sometimes use structural presupposition to gain the acceptance of the hearers about what happened. In other word, people tend to create presupposition for certain ptirpose and hence, besides the economical principle which becomes the main reason why people presuppose, there is still other reason of why people make presuppositions. This research also shows that some concepts of presupposition are applied within conversation such its projection problem and how the presupposition is categorized into various types based on its presupposition triggers.

In the following research, other researchers may analyse how presuppositions are used in other contexts of discourse. Other researchers also can find how presupposition gives some benefits in the people daily conversation and how presuppositions help the readers to understand the written discourse.