A Study On Presuppositions In Cell Phone Messages Of College Students

With the popularity of cell phones, sending cell phone messages is becoming one of the most favored communicative means for many people. As the language of cell phone messages tends to be brief and flexible, easy and lively, from a linguistic point of view it can be seen as a new type or register language that needs more attention and focus. This paper aims to explore the phenomenon of presupposition of cell phone text messages and its influence on effective communication.Although a small number of scholars have already done some research on presupposition in cell phone messages, the object of their studies has been about humorous cell phone messages, a special type of messages in which features of daily used cell phone message as a whole can not be well reflected and represented. Therefore, this paper attempts to take various kinds of common communicative cell phone messages as the research object and tries to obtain those general features of language in cell phone messages. In addition, as many as 120 pairs of genuine cell phone messages are collected from three different universities in Taiyuan, serving as the corpus for the present study. The reason for choosing college students as the source of the corpus is that young people, particularly college students are the most frequent users of cell phone messages, thus their language use in cell phone messages may be more representative and deserves more studies. As for the research methodology, a qualitative approach is mainly adopted despite the fact that in some sessions a quantitative approach is also used.The thesis consists of six chapters. The first chapter briefly introduces the research background as well as the structural framework of the whole thesis. Chapter two is a literature review, in which studies on cell phone messages, on presupposition and those on presupposition in cell phone messages are reviewed and evaluated respectively. The third chapter outlines the theoretical basis of this study from the perspective of semantic and pragmatic presuppositions as well as presupposition triggers. In Chapter four, research questions, research methodology and the tools for analysis are all covered. Chapter five is the major part, and it starts with linguistic features of cell phone messages. Both semantic and pragmatic presuppositions in cell phone messages are examined; possible contributions of presuppositions to effective communication as well as problems in presupposition use in cell phone languages are explored. Based on the introduction of various contextual factors involved in cell phone message communication, the author suggests message senders employ presupposition under the guidance of context in order to realize effective communicative goals. The last chapter summarizes the achievements and limitations of the present study, and in the end, several suggestions for future work are put forward.