A Study On Pragmatic Presuppositions Applied In The Detective Story-The Hound Of The Baskervilles

Presupposition, a linguistics conception, refers to the known information which is not asserted but implied by the speaker in a communicative activity. Presupposition, especially pragmatic presupposition, is used to analyze different language phenomena. It is a useful and effective device to imply information.The detective stories, which have a lot of implied information, are always analyzed from the angle of style, narrative pattern or the characters in the stories. The researches on the pragmatic presupposition are few. Whether pragmatic presupposition is often used in detective story reading and how pragmatic presupposition is applied to detective stories will be the focus of this thesis. This thesis aims to guide readers to better appreciate the detective stories from the perspective of pragmatics.Based on the previous researches, the pragmatic presupposition in detective stories will be analyzed on Yule's classification of pragmatic presuppositions. The quantitative study and the qualitative study are applied in this thesis. Dialogues are chosen from one of The Stories of Sherlock Holmes ---- The Hound of the Baskervilles as data to analyze the use of pragmatic presupposition in a detective story, because dialogues are a real way to transmit and acquire information in detective stories. The quantitative study tends to analyze the frequency of different presupposition triggers and pragmatic presuppositions. The qualitative study focuses on the analysis of the functions of different kinds of pragmatic presupposition in this novel.The analysis shows that pragmatic presuppositions are used frequently in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Yule's six kinds of pragmatic presupposition are adopted in the dialogues of the story, including existential presupposition, factive presupposition, lexical presupposition, structural presupposition, non-factive presupposition and counterfactual presupposition. Through the analysis, structural presupposition and lexical presupposition are the most frequently used devices which could be realized by their different kinds of presupposition triggers. Structural presupposition can be triggered by temporal clause, cleft sentence, non-restrictive relative clause and questions. Lexical presupposition is the presupposition triggered by implicative verb, change of state verb, verb of judging or iterative. These two kinds of pragmatic presuppositions are used to design the implied information and attract readers to make inferences. It is also found that the economization function, together with coherence function and the prominence of information, sets a writing standard for detective story creators. The functions of pragmatic presuppositions are supposed to help readers understand the whole story.The pragmatic presupposition is helpful to shorten the gap between readers and the story. According to the analysis and inference of pragmatic presuppositions, the readers could not only enjoy the process of indication of the information hidden in the presuppositions, but also enter into the fictional world of the story as the detective. The analysis on pragmatic presupposition in detective story reading is helpful for the readers to comprehend authors'writing skill and has a further understanding of artistic charm of detective stories. This thesis serves as an effective way for the appreciation of detective stories and is a preliminary attempt of employing linguistic approach to analyze detective stories.