PRESUPPOSITION TRIGGERS IN EDITORIALS OF THE JAKARTA POST

The objectives of the study were to find out: (1) the realization of presupposition triggers in editorials of The Jakarta Post and (2) the reasons for using presupposition triggers in editorials of the Jakarta Post. The study was descriptive qualitative. The source of data was The Jakarta Post online website. The data of the study were the sentence or clause which triggered the presupposed meaning in editorials. The data were identified, analyzed, and categorized based on Levinson’s theory (1983). The findings of the study showed that: (1) twelve from thirteen presupposition triggers were suggested by Levinson (1983) found in editorials namely: definite description, factive verb, implicative verb, change of state verbs, judging verbs, iterative item, cleft sentences, questions, temporal clause, comparison clause, counterfactual conditional sentence and non-restrictive relative clause, while implicit cleft with stressed constituents was not found. In addition, given clause, parenthetical information, prepositional phrase and the quantifier all (of) were the new presupposition triggers found in this study. (2) The reasons why the editorialists used presupposition triggers in editorials of The Jakarta Post were a) commonly to present the background information which is assumed to be true, b) to recall the readers toward the information of the event that they have not unintentionally acknowledged, c) to interpret the editorialists’ attitude on the fact of the event and d) to awaken the readers’ curiosity to the questioning things. Based on the findings, the use of define description, which was found the most dominant occurrence among the other triggers, was signed the way of editorialists to present more their background assumption or information based on fact. This aimed to balance the opinion that they presented in their editorial texts. Some suggestions are directed to those who are interested in understanding presupposition in any discourse especially journalistic text.