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Assumptions in Applicant
Task E – Our answer
In an interview or an interrogation session it seems pretty odd to be
asking whether someone has eczema, a skin condition. But this oddity does
not seem that much different from lots of other questions Miss Piffs asks
– whether the interviewee is a moody person, puzzled by women, and
so on.
However, asking someone whether they have falling coat
is a different order of oddity altogether. Human beings can have falling
hair, but ‘falling coat’ is a term normally applied to animals
with hair coats, like cats and dogs. Hence if you ask someone if they
have falling coat you appear to be presupposing that the person is an
animal, not a human being. It is arguable that ‘suffer from . .
. listlessness’ is similar. Human beings can be listless, and can
suffer from various medical conditions (e.g. migraine) but we are usually
talking about animals (or perhaps small babies, who can’t yet talk)
when we say that something suffers from listlessness. The presuppositional
oddity we have seen with ‘falling coat’ and possibly ‘suffer
from . . . listlessness’ in turn 45 is connectable to the question
‘On heat?’ in turn 41. Female animals that are ready to conceive
if fertilised are usually said to be on heat. But ‘on heat’
can also be used metaphorically in some informal contexts (usually in
the speech of young adults) to refer to a human being who is looking for
sexual activity, so the connection between turns 41 and 45 is not certain.
That said, the presuppositional absurdity of ‘falling coat’
does seem pretty certain, so now we can see that the absurdity in the
sketch dois not just relate to schematic assumptions but also to presuppositions
in particular sentences.
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