Pragmatic Presupposition: Dynamic Choices Of Utterance-building Ingredients

Linguist, Jef Verschueren, general secretary of International Pragmatics Association, proposed "the theory of adaptation" in his book Understanding Pragmatics(2000), exploring language use from a new perspective. The theory holds that using language consists of continuous making linguistic choices, consciously or unconsciously. These choices are made at every level of linguistic structures, for example, the choices of utterance-building ingredients in structural objects of adaptability. And the utterance-building ingredients (hereafter:UBIs) include sound structure (intonation/stress /pause); morphemes and words, clauses and sentences etc. The key point to choose is dynamic adaptation. In fact the choices of utterance-building ingredients are the contents of adaptation. These contents, which must be in the process of dynamic adaptation, are meaningful, for the use of language is a process of dynamic choice itself.Frege, German philosopher, first put forward the concept of presupposition in 1892 in the field of philosophy and later led it into linguistics. With further study on presupposition, the majority of scholars, both at home and abroad, do researches from the angle of pragmatics. And they found that presuppositions are closely related to some special words and surface structures, which can trigger presupposition. Levinson has classified presupposition triggers into 13 categories.Obama, the first black president in the United State, has made numerous speeches on his way to the presidency. The data of the research are the top ten famous speeches collected from the speech against the Iraq War in Oct.2002 to the Inaugural Address on Jan.20th,2009. As a particular type of English political public speaking (hereafter:EPPS), the series of Obama's famous speeches (hereafter:OFSs) are really typical. As a kind of popular raw materials, a large number of related researches have been conducted from various aspects, including:the interpersonal meaning, stylistic features, rhetorical devices and so on. Meanwhile, the political public speaking is the typical text which has high requirement of the dynamic choices of language, for spilt water can never be gathered up. So, the present research sets out to explore Obama's famous speeches from a completely new perspective, that is:combining the dual characteristics of both spoken and written versions of Obama's famous speeches, the author has brought Levinson's classifications of presupposition triggers back to three levels:phonological level, lexical level and syntactic level on the basis of the theory of adaptation, under the framework of the dynamic choices of utterance-building ingredients in structural objects of adaptability, in order to analyze the application of pragmatic presuppositions in Obama's famous speeches.Through thorough and detailed explorations of the raw materials, we have found that presuppositions are widely used in OFSs as utterance-building ingredients, with dynamic choices of them, they have great effects on these speeches.The thesis aims at exploring the skills and linguistic strategies (presuppositions) which Obama, the black leader has applied to attract the audience, to adapt to the psychology of the audience, to affect them, to capture their minds, to gain the support from them, and then to achieve the goal of political persuasion. With the research of application of presupposition in Obama's famous speeches from the perspective of the dynamic choices of utterance-building ingredients in structural objects of adaptability, the thesis also provides a multi-dimensional new approach to appreciating and understanding political speeches. In addition, the thesis gives a helpful touch to some English speaking lovers.