A Cognitive Study Of Pragmatic Presupposition In Courtroom Inquiry From The Perspective Of Figure-Ground Theory

Since presupposition was put forward by philosopher Frege in1892, it has attracted theattention of lots of philosophers and linguists and become one of the hot-debated issues. In thelinguistics, as one of the important research subjects in pragmatics, presupposition isfrequently applied to courtroom inquiry, where prosecutors or lawyers employ presuppositionto achieve favorable evidences to make accusation and defense because of its inherentcharacteristics. It is found in the previous studies on pragmatic presupposition (PP) in thecourtroom inquiry that scholars have studied PP from different aspects, mainly focusing onthe discussions on the written legal documents and making a description of the superficialform of PP strategies, but neglect the deep interpretation of PP.This thesis tries to elaborate on the generation and interpretation mechanism of PP fromthe perspective of cognitive linguistics, in the framework of Figure-Ground Theory, by meansof the analysis of scripts of an American legal drama “Law and Order”. Specifically speaking,this thesis reveals the correlation mechanism by comparison to the Figure-Ground and thespecific questions-presupposition and makes a deep and detailed analysis of the generation,interpretation, features and functions of PP in order to help people understand theinterpretation process of PP more completely, to identify PP hidden in the questions and toaim to avoid the passive situation where it’s easy to fall into the trap by the questioners.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One will pursue the background, thepurpose and significance, research methodology and the structure of the thesis. Chapter Twomainly gives a review of presupposition and forensic linguistics respectively. Chapter Three isdevoted to the theoretical framework, starting out from the origin of Figure-Ground Theoryand the Principle of Pr gnanz and focuses on Talmy’s and Langacker’s views on theFigure-Ground Theory as well as its features. In Chapter Four analysis and discussions will bedemonstrated. We mainly analyze the interpretation of PP and discuss the approaches toidentify PP along with the functions in the framework of Figure-Ground Theory with the helpof the different features and presentations of PP in terms of the chosen corpus. Chapter Fivebrings together the major findings of this study and points out the limitations in this study andadvances some suggestions for further researches.