An Analysis of Semantic Presupposition in Sherwood Anderson’s Short Story “BROTHERS”

Abstract

Semantic Presupposition is a kind of inference that sentences of natural languages may have. The semantic presupposition is associated with certain lexical items and particular grammatical constructions. A wide range of research has been conducted for explaining presupposition in various domains, the current study is trying to investigate semantic presupposition in the English short story ‘Brothers’ written by Sherwood Anderson through content analysis of the selected texts adopting Yule’s theory (1996) embedding Levinson’s classification of presupposition triggers (1983). Besides, it aims to find the most dominant type of semantic presupposition in the English short story ‘Brothers’ by calculating the types of presuppositions found in the short story. Accordingly, (4) texts have been selected from the English short story, then they were studied in terms of types of presupposition, namely existential, factive, lexical, non-factive, structural, and counter-factual. The results demonstrate that only five types of presuppositions are found in the short story and the total number of presuppositions occurring in the short story is (672) times. Besides, the analysis of the texts shows that the most frequently used presupposition type in the English short story was Existential which appeared (x`560) times or about (83.3%), and the factive presupposition is the least used type which appears (9) times or about (1.3%).