A Study Of Pragmatic Presupposition In The Detective Stories Of Conan Doyle

As an important part in literary works, detective stories are very popular among readers. One of the best authors of detective stories is Arthur Conan Doyle. His most famous detective story collection The Complete Sherlock Holmes has been translated in many languages and widely spread in many countries. The most important character Holmes has become world famous detective.In modern time, the research about presupposition can be traced back to a paper Sense and Reference, which was written by German philosopher and mathematician Frege in 1892. In Sense and Reference, Frege used presupposition to explain the phenomenon of semantic logic. After then, English men Russel and Strawson made deep discusses from different point of views. Just because of their discussions, many logician and linguists were attracted in the phenomenon of presupposition and they then took it into the field of linguistics. In the circle of linguistics, presupposition first developed quickly in the semantics. In 1970s, Stalnaker first put forward the concept of pragmatic presupposition. Presupposition, especially pragmatic presupposition is a quite important tool in the detective stories for the detective to make inferences and finally to succeed in the case.Although there are many researches on pragmatic presupposition, the researches are almost all about the basic theory. Some researchers relate the basic theory to the phenomenon in our life, for example, advertisement, news, trial, law, translation and foreign language teaching etc. But few researches are done about pragmatic presupposition in the text of literature, especially about pragmatic presupposition of certain text of a certain writer. This thesis associates the basic theory of pragmatic presupposition and a literary text, tries to apply pragmatic presupposition to analyze the detective stories of Conan Doyle, and then to find out how the writer uses pragmatic presupposition to connect the novel as a whole and then it will be good for the reader to appropriate the detective stories.The paper is divided into five chapters. The first chapter is the introduction of the whole paper, including the background and significance of the research and the frame of the thesis. The second chapter is the literature review, which introduces the previous studies on Conan Doyle and The Complete Sherlock Holmes, the theory of presupposition and pragmatic presupposition, including the definition, development, classification and characteristics of presupposition, presupposition triggers and the definition, characteristics functions and previous study of pragmatic presupposition. The third chapter, the main part of the thesis, is the research of pragmatic presupposition in the detective stories of Conan Doyle. This chapter will be described in detail in four parts: personal presupposition, context presupposition, background presupposition and addressee presupposition. The fourth chapter is about the pragmatic functions of pragmatic presupposition in the detective stories: a condition to ensure a successful communication, a tool to make language concise and a tool to achieve the speaker's hidden intention. The fifth chapter is the conclusion, including the main findings, limitations and suggestions for the further studies.