Pragmatic Presupposition And Its Pragmatic Strategies

Presupposition has been a controversial research object of linguistics, in particular of semantics and pragmatics. In some respects, presupposition like entailment seems free of context, whereas in other respects it seems sensitive to context, intro-sentential context for example. Semantic theories take presupposition as a semantic relation between sentences based on truth conditional. Pragmatic theories, however, tend to treat presupposition as a sort of appropriate condition to perform speech acts effectively, or mutual knowledge shared by both speakers and addressees. In allusion to this instance, this thesis takes qualitative analysis to demonstrate that presupposition should belong in pragmatics rather than semantics. Such concepts as appropriateness, mutual knowledge, contextual consistency, communicative ends, etc are employed to shed light on the role of context, speakers and their communicative purpose in doing presupposition. Furthermore, it attempts to illustrate the possibility to utilize pragmatic presupposition to carry out pragmatic strategies in terms of features of pragmatic presupposition, subjectivity, and defeasibility for example. For this reason, this research enquires further into the nature and features of pragmatic presupposition and draws a premature conclusion that pragmatic approach to presupposition has much greater strength to account for the problematic properties of defeasibility and projection of presupposition. It hence further verifies Levinson's (1983) view that presuppositions are not invariant or context-independent, and they do not belong in any orderly semantics. Secondly, the present research specifies that pragmatic presupposition take utterances as the basic research unit, because utterances, in comparison with sentences, at least are more flexible in linguistic forms, and even a single word can be an utterance in certain contexts. In addition, this research tries to indicate that it is the sensitivity to context that enables speakers to implement pragmatic strategies with pragmatic presupposition. In this sense, the research demonstrates the feasibility of using such features as subjectivity, defeasibility, and presupposition failure, etc to carry out pragmatic strategies and thus this research can provide some theoretical and practical support for people to employ pragmatic presupposition to achieve particular communicative ends in certain contexts.