A Study of Presupposition Triggers in Some Selected English Scientific Texts

Abstract

The presupposition is a property of language to outline the audience's ideology. Presupposition deals with implicit meanings conveyed by the speaker through particular words. Using presupposition triggers, the author or speaker may be subject to the reader's or listener's interpretation of facts and events, establishing either a favorable or unfavorable bias throughout the text. The current study aims to draw attention to the importance of presupposition triggers and their existence in scientific texts. This study was designed to investigate types of presupposition triggers and the most frequently used ones. This paper is an endeavor to prove the validity of the following assumptions: first, Existential, structural and lexical are the only presupposition triggers that occur within the scientific texts. Second, the existential presupposition is the most frequently used presupposition in diverting attention to other parts of the sentence or utterance. This study is limited to identifying six types of presupposition triggers: existential, factive, lexical, non-factive, structural, counterfactual, adverbial, and relative, according to Yule (1996). The investigation is conducted on seven randomly selected English scientific texts. Finally, the study concludes that the most frequent type of triggers are existential and lexical. After that, the study shows that only three types of triggers are used in the study that are existential, lexical, and structural.