The Analysis Of Pragmatic Presupposition In Political Interviews

Presupposition has long been a great interest to lots of philosophers and linguists. Many of them have done careful research on some aspects of it, but mostly about advertisement materials. Hence, this thesis will set out from presuppositions used in political interviews and discuss how to apply presupposition in political interviews well by analyzing the speech act theory, politeness principle and cooperation principle, thus improve language quality.This thesis introduces Presupposition Theory and displays views held by the different linguists and philosophers of China and West on presupposition theory. Then the relation between pragmatic presuppositions and semantic presuppositions is studied further, in this manner political interviews are viewed as pragmatic presuppositions. After the analyses made on presuppositions employed in political interviews via Speech Act Theory Cooperative Principle (CP) and Politeness Principle (PP) come the following inferences: i) in political interviews questions put forward at the end of a speaker's speech are rich in presuppositions. In most cases, they contain illocutionary acts, ii) in political interviews, generally speaking, speakers set some presuppositions, while hearers endeavor to settle those unfavorable presuppositions. Both the speakers and the hearers breach CP and PP. Finally, the Strategies in Applying and Handling pragmatic presuppositions are discussed.In a word, pragmatic presupposition is a vital research topic in pragmatics which no language worker can afford to ignore. The explorations in presupposition can not only foster communicators' understanding of language, but also enhance their ability to manipulate language.