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The Analysis Of Presupposition Resolutions

Posted on:2008-10-24Degree:DoctorType:Dissertation
Country:ChinaCandidate:Q LiuFull Text:PDF
GTID:1115360215981087Subject:Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
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The concept of presupposition was first put forward by the famous German philosopher Frege in the year of 1895. At first it was only an important issue in the field of philosophy. It is only in recent 30 years that presupposition was introduced in linguistic studies. Because presupposition gives rise to some fundamental questions in semantics, especially questions about the relationship between semantics and pragmatics, i.e. the relationship between definition and usage, it has become the basic target of both semantic studies and pragmatic studies.The dissertation is composed of seven chapters. The first chapter introduces the definition of presupposition, the basic concepts of presupposition studies, and theoretical backgrounds and approaches of presupposition studies. Two major presupposition tests are illustrated, i.e. the negation test and PTB. Early studies of presupposition took semantic approach, using static devices and context free. As the understanding of the nature of presupposition is further developed, people find out that some problems of presupposition cannot be solved from the perspectives of logic semantics. Therefore, researchers started taking speakers, context and propositions into the consideration, which leads to the pragmatic studies of presupposition.Chapter two introduces the recent theoretical development of presupposition. There are currently two most influential theories of presupposition, i.e. Binding Theory and Context Satisfaction Theory. These two theories are based on two dynamic semantic theories, Discourse Representation Theory and File Change Semantics respectively. These two dynamic semantic theories go beyond the traditional Montague static semantics, adopting a dynamic and context orientated approach to anaphoric phenomena in discourses. Developed from these two dynamic semantic theories, Binding Theory and Context Satisfaction Theory take context into the consideration of presupposition interpretation. Due to the differences between these two dynamic theories, there are also differences between Binding Theory and Context Satisfaction Theory. We believe that Binding theory is more suitable for discourse analysis and for disclosing the discourse functions of presupposition. Chapter three introduces the corpus and methods used in the present study. The result of the study is illustrated. Presupposition triggers used in the present study are also introduced.Chapter four introduces the binding resolution. Binding theory claims that presupposition is anaphoric. Therefore, in dealing with presupposition, we adopt the same method as DRT's treatment of pronominal anaphora and this is presupposition resolution. Our analysis shows that Binding theory can correctly reflect the participants'perception of presupposition. However, presupposition possesses more discourse functions than pronominal anaphora and presupposition behaves differently from pronominal anaphora, which is determined by triggers'expressions and semantic types of triggered presuppositions.Chapter five introduces the accommodation resolution. Binding theory claims that there is a big difference between presupposition and pronominal anaphora. If the discourse fails to provide an antecedent for the presupposition, it can create one through accommodation. Different trigger types display different tendency, preference and licensing conditions of accommodation. We believe that the semantic types, assertions related to triggers and whether presupposed information can be the focus of participants can explain those differences.Chapter six introduces bridging resolution. The aforementioned two resolutions cannot reveal the total relationships between presuppositions and contexts. There exists partial connection between them in discourses, which is an indirect anaphoric relation and is called bridging. Therefore, we put forward bridging resolution as a new resolution and summarize its three features so as to make theoretical studies of presupposition more complete.Chapter seven presents a summary and points out the problems that remain unsolved and need further studies.
Keywords/Search Tags:presupposition, anaphora, context, binding resolution, accommodation resolution, bridging resolution
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