Pragmatic Presupposition In The Construction Of Optimal Communicative Context

Due to the cognitive basis of human verbal communication presupposition in communication in this sense is no longer a kind of language phenomenon which concerns the utterance itself but a basic step of the speaker's utterance construction which works as a kind of human cognition. Studying presupposition from this cognitive aspect can let linguists know more about the working processes of the communicator's cognition and the models of human language cognitive ability. The changing of contexts directly influences the interpreting of utterance. That is to say, the presupposition evoked by a given sentence constrains its own appropriateness as a possible continuation of the other sentences preceding it in the discourse; the presupposition evoked by a given sentence also constrains the appropriateness of the other following sentences. Presupposition serves as the departing point for the structuring of information in discourse and continuously introduces new information into the context. Hence, presupposition keeps the context enlarging in the course of communication so that the continuous construction of optimal contexts is possible. The previous study on presupposition has never illustrated how a speaker's intention and certain contexts interact from the perspective of cognition. They neglect the feasibility that by means of presupposition, taking both the speaker's and the hearer's cognitive environment into consideration, the speaker can construct a certain optimal communicative context to achieve his goal.The study of the relation between presupposition, the speaker's communicative intention and the utterance meaning will be carried out under the theoretical framework of Relevance and Adaptation. Therefore, the objective of this thesis has been to study the role of pragmatic presupposition in the process of constructing optimal contexts for communication as well as the addresser's manipulation of pragmatic presupposition in effective communication. On the basis of the previous study and theories of presupposition and context, the author puts forward the concept of optimal communicative context and analyzes the feasibility of its construction after having a further analysis of the features of presupposition and the interaction between context and presupposition. The cognitive context's function of pragmatic constrain and cognitive inference of communicative intention are centered on since either the speaker can control the communicative context to make an utterance or the hearer can select a context to interpret the speaker's intention according to their cognitive environment. The author also...