Manipulation Of Presupposition In Effective Communication

The objective of the present thesis is to study the role of pragmatic presuppositionin the coherent understanding of a discourse as well as the addresser's manipulation ofpragmatic presupposition in effective communication. The hypothesis of the thesis isthat pragmatic presupposition serves as a link in the flow of information in verbalcommunication and the manipulation of pragmatic presupposition contributes to theeconomy and the coherence of the communication. The whole thesis is composed of five chapters. The first chapter is the introduction of the thesis. In this chapter, there are sixsections. In the first section, the conception of presupposition is briefly given from boththe semantic perspective and the pragmatic perspective. Then, comparisons are madebetween presupposition and assertion, presupposition and entailment, presuppositionand implicature. In the second and the third sections, the structure of clauses and contextare reviewed. The other three sections are about the objective, the significance and theorganization of the thesis. The second chapter concerns with the nature of presupposition and it is thetheoretical basis for our analysis of the manipulation of presupposition in effectivecommunication. In this chapter, we tentatively put forward our approach topresupposition, namely, the integration of semantic presupposition and pragmaticpresupposition. We also give a re-classification of presupposition types on the basis of are-analysis of presupposition triggers. This chapter consists of four sections. The firstsection is a brief review of presupposition from both semantic perspective andpragmatic perspective. Semantic presupposition is concerned with the relation betweentwo sentences or propositions and studies it with reference to truth-value conditions. IfSentence a is a precondition for Sentence b to be judgable as either true or false, thenSentence a is the semantic presupposition of Sentence b. Pragmatic presupposition is theaddresser's assumptions about the addressee's state of knowledge concerning thecontext of the current utterance. Pragmatic perspective studies presupposition in termsof "context", "speaker" and "hearer". The second section lists three kinds ofgenerally-accepted definitions of pragmatic presupposition. The first conception treatspragmatic presupposition as the speaker's assumptions on the context of the utterance.The second conception takes pragmatic presupposition as the felicity condition for theperformance of a speech act. The third conception regards pragmatic presupposition asthe common knowledge or background knowledge shared by the speaker and the hearer.The third section of this chapter is about our approach to presupposition. On the basis ofthe semantic conception and the pragmatic conception of presupposition, we suggest acombined approach to it, namely, the analysis of presupposition should take intoconsideration the context and the participants of the communication as well as the overtindicators. We also suggest a re-classification of types of presupposition at threelinguistic levels, i.e., the phonological level, the lexical level and the syntactic level.The analysis of presupposition-indicators at these three linguistic levels shows thepossible linguistic devices available in discourse. The fourth section gives a descriptionof the features of pragmatic presupposition, namely, being appropriate to the contextand being common to the speaker and the hearer. The third chapter is the main part of the thesis. It concerns with the important roleof presupposition in the coherent understanding of utterance meanings. This chapterreveals that proper employment of presupposition contributes to the coherence and theeconomy of verbal communication. In the first section, discussions are made aboutlinguistic factors that could indicate the arrangement of presupposition. Speakers canemploy phonological devices, lexical devices and syntactic devices to arrange theirpresupposed information in verbal communication. An analysis of these devices couldhelp the discourse...