Presupposition in Philippine and American Editorial Headlines: A Contrastive Study

Abstract

Presupposition, as one of the properties of language which impinges on readers’ understanding of facts and events through using subtle linguistic devices and constructions, is considered as an interesting topic in a linguistic research. Particularly, its role in newspaper editorial headlines is of great importance as it aids the writers in propagating their ideologies. This paper aimed to describe the forms and functions of presupposition in Philippine and American English editorial headlines. To support the study, the research sheds the light to semantic presupposition and employed the ‘constancy under negation’ technique. Furthermore, this study focused on the linguistic devices that trigger presupposition as proposed by Yule (2010) respectively. Through a contrastive textual analysis of the 60 randomly selected headlines, the author identified that the most dominant presupposition trigger in both groups is existential presupposition. It revealed that there are various similarities between the two groups rather than their differences as far as presuppositions are concerned. This study also showed that presupposition is important in enabling the editorial writers to make claims without actually asserting them directly in the headlines.