The Role of Presupposition in The Meaning of Kawaii

Abstract

Kawaii is a Japanese word that generally mean as things that are cute, innocent and adorable. It turns out that there are also the other side of Kawaií which some people called as ugly or weird based on their own perspective or experience. The purpose of the study was to found out that by using presupposition theory, an implied meaning from utterances that has been written founded. The data came from a conversation with the topic of Kawaii culture in one of the social media platform named Quora. The study used qualitative research method by Miles and Hubermann in order to sort and condense the research data. The result is that the presupposition contributed in giving assumption of meaning Kawaii by extracting the propositions. Each of the presupposition have the same role but might result in a different proposition based on the utterances’ context. Presupposition also contributed in building a social identity with a context of whether Kawaii considered as cute or weird in terms of the differences between cultures.