A Comparative Study On Presupposition Triggers In English And Chinese Printed Commercial Advertisements

The concept of presupposition is an important issue in logics. It has been introduced to linguistics since the 1960s and studied mostly from the aspect of types, characteristics and functions. However, the touch on presupposition triggers is rare. Presupposition triggers refer to the lexical terms and grammatical structures which can presuppose. Due to different cultural background, thought pattern and philosophical view, usages of presupposition triggers differ in different contexts. Based on the selected ads (=ads) from English and Chinese printed media, a comparative study is made from the perspective of the types, characteristics and affecting factors of presupposition triggers in English and Chinese contexts. The thesis aims to discover the similarities and differences of presupposition triggers in both contexts.The researcher collects the data mainly from the magazine named businessweek and books of ads collections. Further, case study and contrastive analysis approach are employed. The results show that 11 types of presupposition triggers are similar in both contexts; the author also discovers that poems and proverbs can be used as presupposition triggers in Chinese contexts. Further, presupposition triggers share the characteristics of commerciality, triggering, compliance and subjectivity. However, due to the different characteristics of the English and Chinese people, different types of presupposition triggers are used to comply with the different characteristics. Moreover, the author concludes that cultural background, thought pattern, and philosophical view are the affecting factors of the different choice of presupposition triggers. Due to the limited time, the data is mainly collected from the field of commercial ads, which will surely cause an uncompleted analysis. Besides, as the touch on presupposition triggers is rare, the available references are difficult to reach.