An Analysis Of The Textual Function Of Presupposition In News Discourse

Presupposition, a pervasive feature of language, has long been an issue studied by both philosophers and linguists. The textual function of presupposition manifests itself in various aspects, some of which are commonly found in discourse in general and some are more or less popular in discourse of a certain register.The present study was undertaken to investigate the textual function of presupposition in English news discourse in terms of Themes, thematic progression patterns and other means of textual cohesion and coherence. The theoretical framework for the analysis of the sample passages in the present study is based on Thompson's interpretation of textual function (Thompson, 1996: 118) and the thematic progression patterns proposed by Danes (1974), Xu Shenghuan (1982) and Hu Zhuanglin (1994).In order to make a more relevant and comprehensive analysis of thematic progression patterns in news discourse, the present study concluded four thematic progression patterns of its own on the basis of the thematic progression patterns put forward by Danes (1974), Xu Shenghuan (1982) and Hu Zhuanglin (1994).Presupposition is usually classified into semantic presupposition and pragmatic presupposition; at the same time, there are three dominant views about the relationship between the two, that is, semanticism, pragmaticism and complementarism.Semanticism views presupposition as a purely semantic notion; pragmaticism conceives of presupposition as a pragmatic phenomenon and also assimilates semantic conceptions of presupposition into a pragmatic one; complementarism maintains an in-between position, a position between semantic presupposition and pragmatic presupposition. The present study took the standing of complementarism, in other words, it combined the semantic view with the pragmatic one.The research materials analyzed in the present study include 20 English news discourses randomly selected from New York Times and Washington Post in America from 2007-2008.The analysis of the data has yielded the following conclusions:1. Presupposition in news discourse, mostly realized through nominalization, could serve as the Theme of a clause to help the reader to hook this clause onto the earlier clauses so that the information expressed in the remainder of the clause fits in with what has already been said. Besides, presupposition could help construct various thematic progression patterns to push forward the information flow or to ensure that the discourse develops in a desired way. The thematic progression patterns mainly involved in the present study include T1→T2 pattern (the same Theme is continuously employed for different Rhemes to follow), R1→T2 pattern (the assertion in the preceding Rheme is encapsulated into a noun phrase as the new Theme for the new Rheme to follow), T1+R1→T2 pattern (both the presupposed and asserted information in the preceding clause combine into a noun phrase and recede into presupposition as the new Theme of the following clause) and R1→R2 pattern (the new information as Rheme in the previous clause is encapsulated into a noun phrase in the subsequent clause as part of its Rheme).2. Of the four patterns formed through presupposition, T1→T2 pattern is found to be the most frequently used in the present study, R1→T2 pattern, the second, R1→R2 pattern, the third and T1+R1→T2 pattern, the last. This partly confirms the conclusion drawn by Francis (1990) that news reports employ more T1→T2 and R1→R2 patterns. The high frequency of the T1→T2 pattern agrees with the features of news discourse. As news discourse frequently aims to elaborate one Topic from different perspectives, the T1→T2 pattern, in which the same Theme is kept unchanged for different Rhemes to follow, can best satisfy the need of the register. Such textual function of presupposition in forming Themes or thematic progression patterns is also consistent with the informativeness constraint proposed by Giora (1997), that is, each proposition in discourse should be more (or at least not less) informative than the one that precedes it. 3. Presupposition helps achieve cohesive relation in news discourse also through third person pronouns, comparative and conjunctions. In addition, nominalizations which appear elsewhere rather than initially as Themes also perform a cohesive function. Ellipsis or substitution, which presupposes what exists in the preceding clause, has the same textual function.4. Presupposition, pragmatically defined as common knowledge of the addresser and addressee, contributes to coherence in news discourse. When the information is assumed by the journalist to be known to the addressee or the public, it will not be explicitly expressed in the subsequent discourse because the journalist assumes that the readers are able to invoke the common knowledge and supply the missing information; as a result, the apparently non-cohesive discourse is coherent in deep structure.The conclusions of the study might have some pedagogical implications. First, it is necessary and beneficial for second language learners to have an adequate knowledge of presupposition so as to facilitate their output both orally and in written form. Second, teachers are expected to make more efforts to arouse the second language learners'awareness of the importance of presupposition, which in turn will deepen their understanding of the target language from the discourse level. What's more, the results of the present study suggest that the introduction of register into English teaching and learning will help to develop learners'communicative competence.