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During the controversy over John Ashcroft’s nomination for U.S. attorney general, the "American Prospect" stated, "Senate Democrats should spare Ashcroft the anxiety that derives from pretending to enforce laws he finds deeply immoral." Reading this, an angry Ashcroft supporter might be unaware that her discomfort derives from the author’s use of presuppositional constructions, formal linguistic mechanisms that writers employ to trigger inferences. In the quoted sentence, the factive verb "pretend" presupposes that the statement that follows it is untrue, i.e., that Ashcroft does NOT enforce laws he finds deeply immoral. Also, the definite description "the anxiety..." presupposes that Ashcroft’s anxiety exists. Presuppositional constructions allow a writer to present information to the reader as if it were shared knowledge; thus they are considered a powerful tool for shaping opinions. This study investigated 20 articles on the Ashcroft controversy taken from 10 liberal and 10 conservative magazines; and discovered that both liberal and conservative authors use presuppositional constructions to reflect their political agendas. For both, the most frequently used construction was the definite noun phrase, though differences exist in the relative frequency of other presuppositional constructions. |
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