A Relevance-based Approach To Pragmatic Presupposition In English Utterances

The term "presupposition" was first introduced by the famous German philosopher Gottlob Frege in his paper "On Sense and Reference" in 1892. Since that, it has been drawing much attention from logicians, philosophers and linguists. Philosophical investigations of presupposition (Frege, 1892; Russell, 1905; Strawson, 1952) mainly concern debates about the nature of reference and referring expressions. On the basis of these studies, the semantic notion of presupposition is suggested, which holds that the presupposition is a semantic relationship between sentences or propositions that remains constant under negation. Then, alternative pragmatic notions of presupposition are developed, where presupposition is defined in terms of mutual knowledge, felicity condition, implicature, etc. Although the phenomenon of presupposition has escaped the restriction of the fixed and strict semantic relation of truth-value, and entered the more multitudinous pragmatic study of language use, all the traditional pragmatic approaches to presupposition still risk being static and idealizing. More often than not, scholars have been studying pragmatic presupposition of individual sentence instead of pragmatic presupposition in process of communication, and consequently important factors like the interlocutors' cognition in communication are neglected.The present thesis studies the pragmatic presupposition from the perspective of Relevance Theory by three aspects of cognitive context, ostensive-inferential communication and optimal relevance. Through its analyses, the thesis can work out the pragmatic presupposition in utterances aiming at the optimal relevance to achieve communicative effects with the help of ostensive-inferential communication model in particular cognitive context. Especially, the thesis manages to find out the relationship between pragmatic presupposition quantity and cognitive context, and the relationship between pragmatic presupposition and relevance. For the former one, if the communicators' cognitive context or cognitive information is more similar, the quantity of pragmatic presupposition is larger, and expressed (spoken-out) information is less, and vice verse. For the second relationship, the thesis concludes three kinds: (1) pragmatic presupposition as the source of relevance; (2) pragmatic presupposition as relevance indicator; (3) pragmatic presupposition as relevance condition.