Pragmatic Presupposition In Rhetorical Utterance--A Link Between Pragmatics And Rhetoric

Since pragmatics was brought forward in 1938, it has just experienced a short period of developments. But in the recent over twenty years, it has been a promising and independent linguistic discipline. Along with the flourishing developments of cross-culture, sociology, rhetoric, and other branches of social science, the prevailing trend is that scholars have been attempting to make interdisciplinary approaches to pragmatics and trying to reconcile the principles and practices of pragmatics with the theories of the above-mentioned disciplines. This thesis just presents a study of pragmatics by combining it with rhetoric.After examining the history and definition of pragmatics, the thesis touches upon the relationship between pragmatics and rhetoric. Through the analysis of some pragmaticists' interpretations to rhetoric, and the discussion of the importance of context in both of these disciplines, the author finds that there exists a kind of kinship between pragmatics and rhetoric, for they have overlapping concerns in the matter of the meaning changes of utterances, language use, the effects of language upon the audience and the role of context in the production and interpretation of utterance.Based on such close relationships between pragmatics and rhetoric, the following part of the thesis focuses attention on one basic concept —presupposition. It has been one hot-debated topic in the fields of philosophy, semantics and pragmatics. My study is from a perspective of pragmatics. The conclusions to be drawn from this study are as follows: (1) pragmatic presupposition is prerequisite to rhetorical utterance comprehension; purposeful pragmatic presupposition is employed to affect the hearer's understanding. (2) How to set proper quantity of pragmatic presupposition is essential for realizing the hearer's exact comprehension to utterance; phonetic, lexical and syntactic devices are used into practical setting of pragmatic presupposition. These findings, in microscopic sense, support the view that rhetorical utterance can be explained and analyzed by pragmatic presupposition; and in macroscopic sense, support the view that pragmatics and rhetoric are closely tied with one another.