Analysis On Pragmatic Presupposition In The American Legal Drama,The Good Wife

Forensic linguistics contains the knowledge of law and linguistics and it has become an independent discipline.Legal drama provides much research corpus for forensic linguistics and attracts more and more scholars’ studying interest.As a TV series focusing on law,legal drama is characterized by gripping case referencing and courtroom debate,and the feature of legal drama determines that it is inseparable from the employment of pragmatic presupposition.Presupposition stems from philosophy,and the study from the perspective of pragmatics has become a hot topic since it was introduced to the field of linguistics.Pragmatic presupposition means the common knowledge known by two parties before uttering a proposition,and the speaker assumes the information is true,which contributes to a successful communication.In legal drama,the prosecution and the defense employ pragmatic presupposition in their questions to obtain the desired information,therefore,the witness and the defendant may fall into presupposed traps,or they may also recognize or break pragmatic traps.Overall,related people involved in a legal case can adopt different presupposition strategies when they are competing in order to realize their goals and eliminate unfavorable influence.The thesis aims to explore three questions:in the American legal drama,The Good Wife,how pragmatic presupposition is triggered,features of pragmatic presupposition and how to recognize presupposition traps.Based on the theory of pragmatic presupposition,by selecting related corpus from the first season and the second season in The Good Wife,the thesis analyzes how legal workers skillfully employ pragmatic presupposition through qualitative method and content analysis.Here are some conclusions:legal workers usually trigger pragmatic presupposition from three levels:lexical level,syntactic level and phonemic level;the commonly used features are defeasibility and subjectivity;considering the person who asks questions is the lawyer of the opposite party,the witness should be alert to the inquiry,and the witness can eliminate unfavorable effect through external help,like the judge’s timely involvement resulted from his own lawyer.This thesis can provide legal professionals with some implications of their language skills and promote their deeper understanding of pragmatic presupposition;meanwhile,for lovers of legal drama,some detailed analysis can help them better understanding the plots.