On The Actual Linguistic Presupposition Triggers In The Dialogues Of Sons And Lovers

Presupposition was first introduced by a German philosopher Frege in his paper On sense and Reference (1892) and soon became the object of linguistic analysis. There are two categories of presupposition: semantic presupposition and pragmatic presupposition. In 1979, Karttunen put forward the concept of'trigger'in his Presuppositional Phenomenon, and listed 31 triggers in detail, which were classified into thirteen types by Levinson (2001) in his Pragmatics. When analyzing presupposition triggers, scholars at home and abroad usually use Levinson's classification with 13 types of triggers. In this research, based on Levinson's classification, the present author observes the presupposition triggers from two levels including lexical level and syntactic level. Lexical presupposition triggers refer to the words or phrases which can trigger presupposition, and the presupposed information is embedded in the meaning of such words or phrases. Syntactic presupposition triggers include the sentence structures which can induce presupposition.Based on the dialogues in Sons and Lovers, the author of this thesis picks up all the sentences with what Levinson said about the presupposition triggers, sets up a database with all the triggers and sentences, then makes a statistic analysis of presupposition triggers in the database at lexical and syntactic levels, and analyzes the proportions and functions of presupposition triggers in the text as well.Through a careful study, the present author finds out that lexical presupposition triggers are used much more frequently than syntactic presupposition triggers. Lexical presupposition triggers include verbs, definite descriptions and iteratives, among which verbs are used the most and are the very triggers the author would like to analyze. Verb presupposition triggers include factive verbs, implicative verbs, change-of-state verbs and verbs of judging. Syntactic presupposition triggers refer to temporal clauses, cleft sentences, comparison and contrasts, counterfactual conditionals and questions. Questions are used quite more frequently than others, which also indicate Lawrence's intention to show the characters'doubts about the real world.From the findings of the research, the author of this thesis draws the following conclusion: presupposition triggers have seven functions in the novel. The seven functions are making the sentences more economical and concise, projecting the information focus, providing new information or bringing about a new topic, emphasizing, linking up the contexts or making context more cohesive and coherent, denoting speaker's attitudes or judgment, providing more information.