The Presuppositional Power Of EVEN

Presupposition is so attractive that several decades of research and debate never stop. As we have known, both semantic and pragmatic presupposition play a very important role in the history of linguistics. Semantic presupposition refers to a general proposition deducted by a sentence itself without any context. In the linguistic branch of pragmatics, a presupposition is an implicit assumption about the world or background belief relating to an utterance whose truth is taken for granted in discourse. A presupposition must be mutually known or assumed by the speaker and addressee for the utterance to be considered appropriate in context. It will generally remain a necessary assumption whether the utterance is placed in the form of an assertion, denial, or question, and can be associated with a specific lexical item or grammatical feature in the utterance. Although the status of semantic-or-pragmatic presupposition cannot be agreed in the circle of linguistics, it will not influence its use and development in some single word.This paper is an attempt to look at even in the sense of presupposition. Presupposition, as a basic theory, is not only the main theory of the word even but also the cut-point of the word even. From the angle of traditional grammar, even is an adverb which is not paid much attention by others. However, as a changeable presupposition trigger, even shapes meanings of a sentence. Early in 1965, even had been investigated in transformational terms. Then scholars like Karttunen and Peters and Rooth declaimed their understanding on even. Along with the previous research on even, comparison between even and the other words such as let alone and not to mention and much more is put ahead to be a key point. Through this comparison, even appears to be more powerful, which can lead to some other meaning in a single sentence. The scope of even has been discussed by lots of foreign linguists from different aspects. And indeed different scope of even leads to different meaning of a complete sentence. However, who cares that just one single word includes some meaning that cannot be seen on the surface. So through a lot of comparisons among corpus of even and its brother words, differences are found and a completely new even can be got.