Presupposition In Courtroom Inquiry

The paper studies the manipulation of meaning through the use of presupposition by the lawyer in the competing courtroom examination. Besides identifying the basic features of question and answer turns, it focuses on the exploration of how the lawyer and the witness use different strategies to impose their own line of argument.One of the effective strategies of meaning manipulation employed in questioning the witness by the lawyer is to cheat the witness into accepting an unbeneficial proposition by constituting a presupposition trap. The presupposition trap is possible because of the below-mentioned characteristics of presupposition: the constancy under negation, the multi-dimension in meaning, the lateness and the subjectivity.Lawyers tend to use the questions hidden with presupposed information in asking the witness. When the presupposed information is intentionally untrue, it will constitute a trap which will cheat the witness into accepting the false proposition if he answers it directly. For the witness, the key is how to express what he intends to say and convince the judge about it on the basis of fighting against the presupposition traps. The first and utmost step is to identify such presupposition traps.Presupposition, according to Geoffery Leech, can be classified into two types: semantic presupposition and pragmatic presupposition. Semantic presupposition, according to Karttunen, L. refers to the assumptions which are determined in advance by the lexicon and the linguistic forms and which are independent of the context of utterance. At the same time, pragmatic presupposition is defined by Geoffery Leech as "in saying X the speaker purports to take for granted the truth Y". The presupposition studied in the paper belongs mainly to the second category.According to the relationship between semantic and pragmatic presupposition, presuppositions of sentences can be predicted from their semantic representations, and pragmatic presupposition always takes on certain semantic forms. Stephen Levinson summarizes thirteen kinds of presupposition triggers, which refer to the semantic...