On Pragmatic Presupposition Based On Courtroom Interactions

The concept of presupposition originates from philosophy and logic. But the study on presupposition is the most popular in the linguistic field. Although the research on presupposition has made many achievements, there are not deep researches at home and abroad on the courtroom presupposition. Furthermore, their researches on presuppositions are confined to describe how lawyers employ presuppositions in trial inquiry. In fact, not only lawyers use the strategy of presupposition, but also judges, prosecutors and both of parties use the strategy. Given the confrontational and goal-oriented feature of courtroom trials, it is of great necessity for us to explain the presupposition in courtroom interactions from the cognitive-pragmatic perspective.With the guidance of relevance theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson (1995), this thesis analyzes the presupposition generation, understanding, characteristics and its role in courtroom interactions through some specific cases from both descriptive and interpretive approach to help people understand the presupposition in courtroom trial deeply and provide a new prospective on presupposition study.The present study attempts to explore the generation, characteristics, defeasibility of pragmatic presuppositions in Chinese courtroom trial with the relevance-theoretical model of presupposition. The data in the present study are collected from three civil cases. All three civil cases are from Lanzhou Intermediate People's Court. The overall Chinese characters are over 22,000 transcribed from more than 8 hours of recordings in total. According to analyzing the data, the author elaborates the generating and the features of pragmatic presupposition and how the presupposition trap is defeated in Chinese courtroom trial from a cognitive-pragmatic perspective .This thesis consists of five parts. The first part presents a brief introduction to the background and significance of the current study with the objective and methodology followed. The second part reviews the related literatures on forensic linguistics and presupposition studies from the logical, semantic, pragmatic perspectives and gives a general account of the presupposition studies in courtroom interactions at home and abroad. In this part the author discusses the strengths and shortcomings of these studies and thereby proposes the necessity from a cognitive- pragmatic study of presupposition. Part three introduces the theoretical framework of the present study and gives a general illustration of relevance theory, including some basic concepts. Meanwhile the author gives a brief introduction of the Principle of Goal-direction proposed by Liao Meizhen (2003). Based on these theories the author proposes a relevance-theoretical model of presupposition. In part four, the author makes an effort to utilize this model to explain the presuppositions in courtroom trial interactions and explain how the judges, lawyers, both of parties employ pragmatic presuppositions to fulfill their goals and how to identify the presuppositions and defeat presupposition traps. Finally, the implications, limitations of the study and suggestions for future studies are provided in the last part.