Presupposition in Poe‟s Short story “The Black Cat”

الملخص EN

The notion of presupposition has been tackled by many linguists.

they have found that the term-presupposition” is being used in two different senses in the literature: semantic and pragmatic.

as for semantic sense, geurts (1999) has isolated some constrictions as sources of presupposition by making lists of presupposition triggers.

concerning the pragmatic sense kennan (1971:89) uses the term pragmatic presupposition to refer to a class of pragmatic inferences which are, in fact, the relation between a speaker and the appropriateness of a sentence in the context.

in spite of the fact that there are many researches that have been done in the field of presupposition but few of them in the field of short stories up to the researcher's knowledge therefore, the study of this story bridges this gap.

it is hypothesized that edgar allen poe has dealt in some way with triggers of presupposition to analyze poe's short story "the black cat".

the researcher will adopt geurts (1999) model of presupposition analysis to study these triggers.

the analysis of this story has shown that poe heavily depends on definite descriptions have ranked first scoring one hundred ninety two occurance, this means that this trigger has effect on the story.

the second trigger non-restrictive clauses scored thirty nine and the third rank has been occupied by adverbial clauses that reoccurred twenty two times in the studied example.

the fourth rank has been for comparative expression which occurred twelve times.

the fifth rank is taken for iteratives which reoccurred six times.

the sixth ranked are factice items are occurred four times.

counter factual conditional occurs twice.

counter factual verbs occurs twice, cleft constructions, and conventional items (1) but implicative verbs, change of state verbs, verbs of judging, wh-questions have no scored in the short story.

this research comes to the conclusion that one of the problems in assessing the nature of presupposition in linguistics is that there is no one concept of presupposition, but several different triggers, all of which have been related to the word of presupposition.