An Analysis of Presuppositions in the Victory Speech of President Joe Biden

Abstract

"Pragmatics is the study of the meaning of a speaker's utterance," according to Yule (1996:3).At the same time it’s the hearer, who deduces the meaning of the utterance from the context of what the speaker wants to convey. Speakers generally make indirect assumptions about the true picture of the situation in everyday status quo, and the meaning or comprehension of what is stated may be altered by the speaker's preconceptions (Haji, and Mohammed, 2019). On this note the notion of presupposition arises. Presupposition is defined as the speaker's implicit but communicated assumption. (Levinson, 1983) As a corollary, the intent of this present descriptive qualitative study is to investigate many types of presuppositions, their triggers and their relevance in Joe Biden's Victory Speech. Additionally, this discourse analysis research investigates what types of presuppositions, and their triggers are used by Biden, as well as it explores in depth the most prominent type of presupposition in the chosen speech. Yule's theory of presupposition classifies presupposition into six categories: existential presupposition, factual presupposition, lexical presupposition, structural presupposition, non-factual presupposition, and counterfactual presupposition. The study's data is comprised of statements that involve presupposition triggers. Levinson's list of lexical and syntactic triggers is adapted to identify presuppositions.

The analysis of Biden’s speech has shown that the president heavily depends on lexical level triggers that have ranked first scoring eight hundred ninety-four occurrences, this means that this level triggers have effect on the speech. The topmost sub category trigger is Noun clauses that are the most prominent one with 683 occurrences. There were one hundred and eleven syntactic level triggers amongst which thirty-four of them are temporal clauses. It was also determined that, like every other speech, Biden's speech is laden with existential presupposition type (82.28%) and every other type of presuppositions has been identified in the president’s speech. The finding of a large number of triggers in this work would aid both linguistic and pedagogical domains.