A Study Of Pragmatic Presupposition In English News Headlines

In this modern society, news has become an essential part of people’s life and played an important role in the development of economy and society. And for a news report, headline is the most important part. It is of great importance in providing information to the readers and attracting the reader’s attention. Previously, what have been studied most frequently on news headlines are rhetoric, metaphor and translation strategy. Presupposition was first put forward by the German philosopher Gottlob Frege(1892). As an important topic in linguistics, especially in pragmatics, presupposition is widely used in news language and has great contribution to news language and news information.Based on the previous studies of presuppositions at home and abroad, this research intends to make a research on the pragmatic presuppositions adopted in English news headlines(ENH). Based on this objective, three research questions are designed for this research:(1) What is the distribution of different types of pragmatic presuppositions used in ENH?(2) How is optimal relevance achieved between readers and the content of news headlines by pragmatic presuppositions in ENH?(3) What are the main pragmatic functions of presuppositions used in ENH? The research materials of this study are news headlines collected from the famous domestic and international online English newspapers, including: China Daily, USA today, Washington Post, The Associated Press and The Guardian. The total number of collected headlines in this research is 553. On the basis of these data, this research makes a pragmatic analysis of pragmatic presupposition in English news headline.Results show that:(1) Among the five types of pragmatic presuppositions, existential presupposition and factive presupposition have higher percentage than the other three types. And the following three types of pragmatic presuppositions are state presupposition, behavior presupposition and belief presupposition.(2) The readers will build up new background knowledge by the process of extracting and handling the presupposed content of presuppositions in ENH, and then connected it with the new information of news report, thus the optimal relevance can be achieved between readers and the content of news headlines.(3) The pragmatic functions of presupposition in ENH are reflected in two aspects. In the aspect of news language, it will make news headline more concise as well as attractive. In the aspect of news language, it will enlarge the information quantity as well as emphasize the information focus of news headline.This thesis consists of five chapters.Chapter One is the introduction of the present research including the research background, research significance, research objectives and the organization of this thesis.Chapter Two is mainly about the literature review of the present study. It introduces the definitions of related terms and presents the features of pragmatic presupposition. After that, the previous studies of presupposition at home and abroad are reviewed. As last, relevance theory is introduced as the most related pragmatic theory to the present study.Chapter Three is concerned with the research questions, research methods, research procedures and data collection. In addition, the working classification of pragmatic presupposition adopted in this study will also be presented.Chapter Four is the main part of this thesis. It throws light on the results and discussions of the data analyses. Firstly, according to Strawson’s definition of presupposition and the working classification of pragmatic presupposition adopted in this study, pragmatic presuppositions occurring in the corpus are identified and classified. Then, it gives out the classification and distribution of each type of pragmatic presupposition in ENH. After that, it presents a detailed analysis of the communication nature of pragmatic presupposition in ENH on the basis of Relevance Theory. Finally, this chapter will explore the pragmatic functions of presupposition used in ENH elaborately.Chapter Five is the conclusion part. It mainly summarizes the major findings, and presents the implications and limitations of this research. Meanwhile, suggestions for further studies are also provided.In conclusion, pragmatic presupposition is broadly applied in ENH and it contributes greatly to news language and news information. Pragmatic presupposition can make news language more concise and attractive as well as helping to enlarge the information quantity and emphasize the information focus. In general, the application of pragmatic presupposition helps to realize the function of news headlines better. Besides, it can help news editors obtain a better understanding of how presupposition works and thus employ such a linguistic device consciously to make the design of news headlines more scientific.