Contrastive Study Of Presupposition In English And Chinese

This paper is a tentative contrastive study of presupposition in English and Chinese, focusing on the similarity and difference in semantic presupposition and pragmatic presupposition in the two languages. Presupposition is a subject widely studied in the field of linguistics nowadays. It was first put forth in the world of philosophy and originated with debates about the nature of reference and referring expressions. It then came into the field of linguistics. The early study of presupposition was from the angle of semantics, which took it as a relation between two propositions. In 1970s, semantic theories of presupposition have been largely abandoned. Various theories of pragmatic presupposition have been put forth. From pragmatics, presupposition is the relation between the sentence and the speaker. The pragmatic presuppositions, despite differing terminology, utilized two basic concepts in particular: appropriateness (felicity) and mutual knowledge (or common ground). This paper tends to take presupposition having two definitions, one is semantic definition which indicates the logical relation between sentences; the other is pragmatic definition which is related to background knowledge. Presupposition is a background belief relating to an utterance, that must be mutually known or assumed by the speaker and addressee for the utterance to be considered appropriate in context, that generally will remain such a necessary assumption whether the utterance is placed in the form of an assertion, denial, or question, and that can generally be associated with a specific lexical item or grammatical feature (presupposition trigger) in the utterance. This is the basic theory principle on which this thesis develops to analyze the similarity and difference between presuppositions in English and Chinese. This thesis consists of the following five parts: Chapter One includes the study on presupposition that has been made home and broad, the purpose and significance of the present paper, the approach and theory adopted in the research and the findings. Most of the study about presupposition is made from two angles: semantics and pragmatics. In extreme cases such as Stalnaker's account, presupposition is defined without any reference to linguistic form: Stalnaker talks not of the presuppositions of a sentence, but of the speaker's presuppositions. Other pragmatic theories are less radical, in that linguistic form still plays an essential role in the theory. At home, most linguists believe that presupposition should be studied from the angles of both semantics and pragmatics. From her literature review, the author finds that little research has been done to make a contrastive study of presupposition in English and Chinese. This paper makes a tentative contrastive study of presupposition in English and Chinese. It first makes a contrastive analysis in the kinds of presupposition-triggers in English and Chinese and their representation in the two languages and then go on to analyze the difference between pragmatic presuppositions in Chinese and English. From the analysis, the author tries to find the similarity and difference in semantic presupposition and pragmatic presupposition in the two languages. Chapter Two gives an overview of the researches in presupposition, including those in philosophy and linguistics which focuses on the different explanations of semantic presupposition and pragmatic presupposition made by the linguists. In a semantic theory, presupposition is usually defined as a binary relation between pairs of sentences. The early studies in this field show that the presupposition is somewhat related to linguistic forms, some of which have been known as presupposition-triggers. In a pragmatic theory, there are different understandings about presupposition, which utilized two basic concepts in particular: appropriateness and mutual knowledge. This paper takes the presupposition as semantic one as well as pragmatic one. Presupposition is abackground belief relating to an utterance that can generally be associated...