The Application Of Presupposition In Criminal Court Debate

The presupposition theory originates from philosophy and is one of the most important topics in pragmatic study. Its first advent resulted in a great interest in the linguistic world. With the development of linguistic, the study of the presupposition moves on from pure analysis of the linguistic and rhetoric characteristics to the relation between language and contexts. Recently, researches on forensic linguistics attract many linguists abroad, while these researches of linguists mostly are limited to the analysis of legal text from the aspects of syntactic and stylistic through traditional grammatical study methods. More attention has been given on the practical application of this theory and the study of inter-practice of presupposition theory and other courses. The specific features of criminal court debate language make a significant contribution to the application of presupposition strategies in criminal court activities under the guidance of presupposition theory.Presupposition is something that the speaker assumes to be the case before making an utterance. According to He Zhaoxiong, presupposition is a kind of pre-condition and has two fundamental concepts: facility and defeasibility. At the same time, a presupposition also has other two features: unipolarity and invisibility. Unipolarity refers to a kind of preposition that is set up by the speaker from his own way before the recognition of the listener. It exists relatively to the speaker. Invisibility refers to the common unspoken information shared by the participants.This thesis is going to analyze the functions of the presupposition in the criminal court debate (induced function, indirect persuasive function and function as a trap) and tries to prove that theses functions meet the need of the language application by the criminal court debate as well as to state that the special function of the presupposition is the major reason of its popularity. The frequent use of the presupposition theory and strategy in the criminal court debate is a very good example. The author also tries to classify the presupposition in the criminal court debate (build-in presupposition, logical presupposition, guilty-yes presupposition and guilty-no presupposition) to make clear that questioners have to explicit their presupposition intention, and conceal the intention and then set out the presupposition through a proper way in order to make effective use of the presupposition in the criminal court debate. From the aspect of answers, they have to learn to recognize the presupposition and get familiar with the types and features of the presupposition, and finally they will cancel or destroy the presupposition. At last, the author concludes the application rules of the presupposition in the criminal court debate.The application of presupposition strategies will be helpful to improve the efficiency of criminal court debate and maintain the legal rights of litigant participants. The study of presupposition strategy in the criminal court debate is of great significance.