Presupposition and the processing of literary texts

Joseph Arko

This dissertation takes as its point of reference Strawson's (1952) important distinction between presupposition and assertion. In the processing of narrative texts this distinction functions to construct the background-foreground structure necessary for the maintenance of coherence in the text. It is in this that readers find the textual perspective which obliges them to understand a text from a certain point of view (Eco 1990). The constructionist theory urges that meaning is not there in the text but is constructed in the mind of the reader making use of pre-existing knowledge structures. This dissertation is a quantitative and qualitative study which seeks to provide empirical evidence to support the claim made repeatedly in the literature that background knowledge constrains the limits of interpretation readers can give to a text. Ghanaian students, as speakers of English as a second language, invariably have problems in accessing the author's cultural presuppositions when they read English literature. Their interpretations are therefore either text-bound and superficial, leading to the creation of impoverished discourse worlds, or they just create discourse worlds other than that intended by the author. The same situation should occur when British students read literary works in English written by authors from different cultural backgrounds. The quantitative study will make use of the verbal protocols of Ghanaian and British readers as they process texts from their own cultural background and from another cultural background. The attempt will be to characterise their interpretative models and account for any differences in a rigorous statistical measure. The qualitative procedures will seek confirmation of the quantitative findings in the natural classroom settings of the subjects. The thrust of the research will be to find ways of developing reading models for students interpreting texts from other cultural backgrounds.