Transference Of Pragmatic Presuppositions In English Versions Of Lu Xun's Stories

Presupposition originated with arguments in philosophy. Frege, a philosopher and architect of modern logic, raised many issues which became central to discussion of presupposition in the following years. Afterwards, presupposition has been adduced in semantics and pragmatics. Presupposition must be mutually known or assumed by the speaker and addressee for the utterance to be considered appropriate in context.But since 1973, semantic theories of presupposition have largely been abandoned since semantic presuppositions fail on many factors. In contrast to the semantic approach, the pragmatic approach regards sentences as the utterances of individuals engaged in a communication act and presupposition is usually believed to be connected with linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge. And many researches on translation have studied presupposition thoroughly. From the perspective of translation, researchers find that it is easier to transfer the semantic presupposition in translation, but how to transfer pragmatic presupposition to target readers is a problem that needs to be further studied.Presupposition is a complex linguistic phenomenon. From the view of translation, taking the complexity of presupposition into consideration will help a translator obtain a better understanding of the source text through the grasping of presupposition information. Lu Xun's stories assuredly mark the peak in the history of Chinese modern fiction. Lu Xun's stories are rich in profound pragmatic presuppositions. This thesis attempts to solve the problem of the transference of pragmatic presuppositions to the target readers in the English version of Lu Xun's stories.The first chapter provides a brief introduction of the purpose of this study, research methodology employed in this thesis as well as the organization of the thesis. The second chapter deals with the definition, classification and features of presupposition. The third chapter represents the combination of the features of Lu Xun's stories and pragmatic presupposition. The fourth chapter is the practical and theoretical study of the transference of pragmatic presuppositions in the translation of Lu Xun's stories. The fifth chapter attempts to solve some problems in the process of the transference through dealing with the related translation strategies and techniques. The last chapter is the conclusion.