The Study On Semantic Presupposition In English Verbs

Since Gottlob Frege, the German philosopher and mathematician raises the concept of presupposition in his works On Sense and Reference at the end of the 19th century, to interpret some semantic phenomenon, the discussions of presupposition have become central in both linguistic field and the field of philosophy. Presupposition is a very important linguistic concept that originates from philosophy. In both linguistic field and the field of philosophy, presupposition was at first considered as definite description, and later on was extended to the field of lexicon and syntactic structure. Since both entailment and presupposition discuss the relationship between the proposition the sentence wants to express and another proposition, the relationship between them is always a hot topic of linguists.In recent years, presupposition has been studied widely in the field of both semantics and pragmatics. This thesis discusses the classification of presupposition. In linguistics it can be classified as semantic presupposition and pragmatic presupposition. Semantic presupposition is conditions on the meaningfulness of a sentence or utterance; conditions on the expression of a proposition. Pragmatic presupposition is defined in terms of assumptions the speaker makes about what the hearer is likely to accept without challenge. From lexical and syntactic points of view, presupposition can also be divided into factive presupposition, non-factive presupposition, counter-factual presupposition, existential presupposition, lexical presupposition and structural presupposition.Presuppositions seem to be tied to particular words-or aspects of surface structure in general. We shall call such presupposition-generating linguistic items presupposition triggers. Large numbers of words and sentential structures, such as factive verbs, implicative verbs, change of state verbs, iteratives, verbs of judging, temporal clauses, cleft sentences, implicit clefts with stressed constituents, non-restrictive relative clauses, counterfactual conditionals and questions can induce presuppositions. Presupposition triggers are helpful for us to understand the true intention of the speaker or writer. This article also deals with some important properties of presupposition. Besides the most important characteristics constancy under negation, presupposition boasts some other characteristics, namely projection of presuppositions and defeasibility.Presupposition is a very important semantic factoring the verb semantic structure, and the presupposition change and the subcategory of verbs are closely related. On this account, presupposition is adopted into a lot of semantic researches of English verbs. This thesis mainly discusses verbs with presupposition-inducing to be the subcategorization, including factive and non-factive verbs, implicative verbs, attitude verbs, judging verbs, change-of-state verbs, performative verbs and discovers that presuppotional semantic features play a very important role in distinguishing synonyms and the different meanings of a polysemic word. Hence, the study on presupposition mechanics of English verbs from the point of view of semantic structures has been proved to be of great importance in both theoretical research and practical teaching and learning.