A Comparative Study Of Pragmatic Presupposition Of News Reports In Chinese And American Media On China-US Trade War Based On The Deduction Evidential

Deduction evidential is one of the important ways indicating information sources.News reporters show evidences for their ideas by deduction evidential.Presuppositions,to some extent,mean inferences made by speakers and hearers according to current communication contexts.So,both China and the US adopt plenty of deduction evidential markers and presupposition triggers in China-US trade reporting.Frequencies and specific realizations of presupposition triggers in both mainstream media are compared to reveal differences and similarities based on sentences with deduction evidential markers and news reports on the China-US trade war that escalated since 2018.This thesis adopts both qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze research materials,and then a comparative study is used to analyze the research results.Then research steps can be listed as follows.Firstly,news reports on China-US trade war are collected from China Daily and the Washington Post lasting from March 2018 to December 2019 randomly to be analysis materials.Then self-established mini corpora and analytical framework in this research are adopted to answer the following questions:(1)What are differences and similarities of frequencies and specific realizations of pragmatic presupposition triggers appeared in both media based on materials with deduction evidential markers?(2)What’s the relationship between deduction evidential markers and pragmatic presupposition triggers?The research results of this thesis indicate that:(1)With a great number of deduction evidential markers used in those two media,both China Daily and the Washington Post have adopted many presupposition triggers based on the materials selected from these news reports and China Daily accounts for more in total.(2)At the same time,the overall tendencies of presupposition triggers in both media are similar to a great extent.Definite descriptions rank the first on the lexical level whilecomparison and contrast rank the first on the syntactic level.What’s more,the last five types are iteratives,non-restrictive clause,cleft sentence,WH-questions and implicit clefts with stressed constituents respectively.The biggest difference is shown in the ranks of change of state verbs and implicative verbs.(3)Deduction evidential markers are not separable from presupposition triggers because both are related to inferences and hypotheses.This thesis has paid not only close attention to news reports and current economic events,but also integrated deduction evidential markers and pragmatic presupposition triggers.It is beneficial to promote interdisciplinary research between deduction evidential and pragmatic presupposition as far as the theoretical meaning is concerned.In terms of practical meaning,analyses of deduction evidential and pragmatic presupposition are of great guidance to news discourse from Chinese and American official media.Moreover,researches on reports made by official media are of great help to explore underlying ideologies and attitudes.