Linguistic Nature of Presupposition in American and Persian Newspaper Editorials

Abstract

Presupposition as a property of language use is generally exploited by language users. Its role in newspaper editorial is of special importance in that editorial writers tend to make use of this property to establish either a favorable or unfavorable bias throughout the text to manipulate their readers’ opinion. Through content analysis of the selected editorials culled from the American newspaper, The New York Times , and the Persian English newspaper, Tehran Times , the present study aimed at identifying the linguistic nature of presupposition employed in the two Englishes . Revealing some genre-specific features of this media discourse, the results of the study also indicated that non-factive verbs and nominalization were the most frequently employed presupposition triggers. However, the papers were different in the frequency and extent of employing other linguistic structures for presupposition purposes. Presupposition as a property of language use is generally exploited by language users. Its role in newspaper editorial is of special importance in that editorial writers tend to make use of this property to establish either a favorable or unfavorable bias throughout the text to manipulate their readers’ opinion. Through content analysis of the selected editorials culled from the American newspaper, The New York Times , and the Persian English newspaper, Tehran Times , the present study aimed at identifying the linguistic nature of presupposition employed in the two Englishes . Revealing some genre-specific features of this media discourse, the results of the study also indicated that non-factive verbs and nominalization were the most frequently employed presupposition triggers. However, the papers were different in the frequency and extent of employing other linguistic structures for presupposition purposes.