The Study of Factive Presupposition in the Movie 'The Maze Runner 3'

Introduction

Background of the Research

Pragmatics is one of the subfield of linguistics that studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, linguistics and anthropology. There are many functions of language in daily life such as to give speech, announces, speak, tell, etc. We cannot communicate in any real sense without language because language helps the people to socialize with each other and can give some kind of information. Language is the central of our human nature, and linguistics is the systematic study of human language. Presupposition entered the area of linguistics and became a significant concept in pragmatics.

The presupposition is referring to the logical meaning of a sentence or meanings logically associated with or entailed by a sentence. It can be said that every utterance produced by the speaker is related to the assumption created by the speaker when he hears the previous utterance. George Yule (1996: 25) stated that a presupposition is something the speaker assumes to be the case prior to making an utterance.

A movie is one of the medias which purpose is to entertain people. There are various characters with different utterances that can be analyzed related to presupposition in a movie, and one of the movies that the writer is interested to analyze is The Maze Runner 3 : The Death Cure. It is a 2018 American dystopian science fiction action film which is a sequel to the 2015 film Maze Runner 2: The Scorch Trials and the third and final installment in the Maze Runner film series. The film received mixed reviews from critics and grossed over $288 million worldwide. Although the movie didn’t receive highly positive reviews like the previous sequels, the writer still thinks that this is a really good movie and there are also a lot of presupposition that can be found in The Maze Runner 3 : The Death Cure movie, that’s why the writer is interested to use the movie as the data source. This research will be entitled “The Study of Factive Presupposition in The Movie 'The Maze Runner 3'”.

Research Problems

Based on the background above, the writer formulates the problem of this research as follows:

1. What are the factive presuppositions found in the movie The Maze Runner 3: The Death Cure ?
2. What is the meaning of each factive presuppositions found in the movie script The Maze Runner 3: The Death Cure ?

Aims of Study

Based on the problems of the research above, the writer formulates the aim of the research as follows:

1. To idenfity the types of presuppositions found in The Maze Runner 3 movie script.
2. To identify the meaning of each presuppositions found in The Maze Runner 3 movie script.

Scope of Discussion

In this research, the study is limited only on theory of presupposition which is proposed by Yule (1996) and also supported by other theories which are related to this research based on the utterances found in the data.

Research Methods

There are 3 important parts in the research method of this study, they are: data source, method and technique of collecting data, and method and technique of analyzing data.

Data Source

The data of this research are taken from the dialogs of the characters in The Maze Runner 3 movie script which was made in 2018 by James Dashner. The reason why the researcher uses the movie dialogue as the data source is that movie dialogues are believed to have a better illustration of the context of situation. Through movie dialogues, we can have a clearer depiction of where and how the conversation takes place.

Method and Technique of Collecting Data

In collecting the data, the writer uses library research technique. (Nazir (2009: 111) stated that library research is a data collection technique to make a review of the study of books, brochures about figurative languages, magazines, and various articles related to the problem. The writer will watch the movie and reads the scripts repeatedly and pays careful attention in every dialog in order to find important utterances that will be analyzed and takes notes on every dialog to identify the utterances that will be taken from the movie.

Method and Technique of Analyzing Data

The data are analyzed by using the qualitative research method. Bogdan and Biklen (1982) stated that qualitative research is descriptive which the data is collected in the form of words or pictures rather than numbers. The data of this study will be analyzed thoroughly from the context of the data, and the presupposition. The context in this research is originated from the movie. The movie will be the context of each presupposition where there is a correlation between the dialogs. First of all, the writer will explain the context of the data where the scene took place and which character was involved in the scene. After the context is explained, the presupposition of the data will be analyzed to match it with the characteristics of factive presupposition. And finally, after all of the data are already analyzed, the result of the analysis will be concluded.

Literature Review

An analysis of presupposition used in The Wrestler, Baluchestan University (Emad Khalili, 2017) is the research on what types of presupposition are often used in The Wrestler movie, a 2008 drama movie writen by Bob Siegel. In this research, the writer uses the theory proposed by Yule (1996) about the types of presupposition and the result of this research is all six types of presupposition are applied in The Wrestler movie. The relevance of the study are the theory used in the study which is the theory proposed by Yule and the data source of the study which is a movie.

The strength of this study is the scope of the study are more comprehensive because it covers all 6 types of presupposition, they are Existential, Factive, Lexical, Structural, Counterfactual, and Non-factive presupposition. While the weakness of the study is the explanation of the data is a bit short and not fully detailed.

Presupposition and Entailment Found in “Angels and Demons”

Movie Dialogue (Ni Kadek Ayu Prahadsini, 2016) is the research on analyzing the types of presupposition and entailment in the movie script “Angels and Demons”. In this research, the writer also used the pragmatic theory about presupposition and entailment as proposed by George Yule (1996). The researcher found out there are 3 types of presupposition in the movie, they are Factive, Counterfactual, and Existential presupposition. The relevance of the study is also the theory used in the study which is the theory proposed by Yule and the data source of the study which is a movie.

According to the writer, the strength of this study are the data findings are already explained in detail and this research also covers the entailment and not just the presupposition where the researcher found out that the entailment of an utterance is not influenced by the speaker meaning or the speaker intention to the hearer, but it naturally follows the utterance from its surface meaning. The weaknesses of this study are the scope of the study is not mentioned which the writer thinks that the scope of the study is too big and not all the data were shown in the file that the researcher found.

Concepts

Concept of Presupposition

In the branch of linguistics known as pragmatics, a presupposition (or PSP) is an implicit assumption about the world or background belief relating to an utterance whose truth is taken for granted in discourse. A presupposition must be mutually known or assumed by the speaker and addressee for the utterance to be considered appropriate in context. It will generally remain a necessary assumption whether the utterance is placed in the form of an assertion, denial, or question, and can be associated with a specific lexical item or grammatical feature (presupposition trigger) in the utterance. According to Collins English Dictionary, A presupposition is something that you assume to be true, especially something which you must assume is true in order to continue with what you are saying or thinking. There are also other types of presupposition based on the context of the utterance, they are:

• Existential presuppositions: They are assumed to be present in possessive constructions and in any definite noun phrase.
• Factive presupposition: The presupposed information following a verb like know can be treated as a fact.
• Lexical presupposition: The use of one form with its asserted meaning is conventionally interpreted with the presupposition that another (non-asserted) meaning is understood.
• Structural presupposition: Certain sentence structures that have been analyzed as conventionally and regularly presupposing that part of the structure is already assumed to be true.
• Non-Factive presupposition: It is one that is assumed not to be true. The verbs imagine and dream are used in those cases.

Counterfactual presupposition: This type creates a presupposition meaning that is contrary to the facts or the opposite of what is true. Based on the definitions above, it is already related to the writer’s study because Factive presupposition in the writer’s study is the presupposed information that will be based on the utterance of the characters in the movie that can be treated as a fact which must be true.

Concept of Movie

Movies, also known as films, are a type of visual communication that uses moving pictures and sound to tell stories or teach people something. People in every part of the world watch movies as a type of entertainment, a way to have fun. For some people, fun movies can mean movies that make them laugh, while for others it can mean movies that make them cry, or feel afraid. Most movies are made so that they can be shown on big screens at movie theatres and at home. After movies are shown on movie screens for a period of weeks or months, they may be marketed through several other media. They are shown on pay television or cable television and sold or rented on DVD disks or videocassette tapes so that people can watch the movies at home. You can also download or stream movies. Older movies are shown on television broadcasting stations. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a movie is a recording of moving images that tells a story and that people watch on a screen or television. So, the definitions shown above are also related with the writer’s study where it can be concluded that a movie is a film that you watch at a theater or at home on your TV, laptop, or tablet.

Theoretical Framework

The main theory of this study as already previously mentioned by the writer is the theory of presupposition which was proposed by George Yule (1996). According to Yule, the presupposition is something the speaker assumes to be the case prior to make an utterance. This is supported by Levinson (1997: 167) who states that presupposition is a pragmatic inference, which means that is based on the contextual assumption that is underlined by the cooperativeness of participants in a conversation, rather than the linguisitcs structures of the sentence. In other words, presupposition is the assumption that someone has in mind when the person hears, reads, or utters an utterance or sentence. Speakers, not sentences, have presupposition. In some discussion about the concept, presupposition is discussed as a relationship between two propositions. Example:

• Mary’s dog is cute ( = p)
• Mary has dog ( = q)
• p >> q

If we say that in the sentence a contains a proposition p, and the sentence in b contains a proposition q, then the sign used is >> which means 'the presupposition'. We can describe the relationship as in c. Yule (2000) also states that presupposition is described as “constancy under negation”. It means that the presupposition of a statement will remain constant even when that statement is negated. As we can see in the example:

• My cat is cute (= p)
• My cat is not cute (= NOT p)
• My cat is cute (= q)

This sentence presupposes that “I have a cat” remains constant although we use negation in the second utterance “My cat is not cute”. The basic trait of a presupposition is a true under negation. A sentence consists of a presupposition even though it is negated and still has the same assumption like the first sentence before negated. Presupposition is interpreted by considering context that exists in the situation when the utterance is happening in order to find out the intended meaning of the speaker to get the information. The context of this utterance should be understood by the listener.