| News reports can reveal facts and convey specific social ideologies and values to audiences in an objective and concise manner.Pragmatic presupposition,as a linguistic strategy,is widely used in news reports because of its common knowledge,appropriateness and concealment.As a result,pragmatic presuppositions in news reports have become an important research topic in the field of linguistics recently.As the issue of climate change becomes more and more intense,news reports of climate change have appeared in large numbers in mass media.However,previous studies on the pragmatic presupposition have focused on advertising and political news,no study on the pragmatic presupposition of news reports of climate change is found yet.Therefore,this study takes 42 news reports of climate change from BBC as research objects and adopts qualitative and quantitative research methods to answer the following two research questions:(1)What are the types and frequencies of pragmatic presuppositions used in the news reports of climate change?(2)What are the pragmatic functions of the pragmatic presuppositions in the news reports of climate change?It finds that firstly,existential presuppositions are most frequently used in news reports of climate change.It is followed by factual presuppositions,which are used in a much larger proportion of news reports than in previous studies of other discourse types.Lexical and structural presuppositions are similar in proportion to other discourse types,ranking third and fourth respectively.Cultural presuppositions appear more frequently in the news reports than non-factive and counter-factual presuppositions.Secondly,the functions of economy,cohesion and coherence,as well as shifting focus and highlighting information are typical pragmatic functions for some types of pragmatic presupposition,which are in line with previous findings on the functions of pragmatic presuppositions in other discourse types.The functions of evoking empathy and reaching social consensus,early warning,stimulating a sense of purpose,aa well as showing attitudes and emotions are novel functions of certain types of pragmatic presuppositions in news reports of climate change,depending on the context in which the climate change crisis is reported. |
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