A Study Of The Functions Of Pragmatic Presupposition And Presupposition Triggers In APEC Business Conference Speeches

With the faster development of economic globalization, various kinds of international business conferences are being hosted every year. As an indispensable part of business conference, speeches can reflect not only speech deliverers’English skills but also their comprehensive abilities.The concept of presupposition was first put forward in1892by Frege in the field of philosophy and later came to linguistics. With deeper researches into presupposition, linguists realized that presupposition is related to certain words or sentence structures, which are named as presupposition triggers and they can be used to trigger presupposition. Scholars also found out that presupposition has its special function in communication. Therefore, deliverers can treat presupposition as an effective strategy to express their implied information.This thesis aims to analyze the application of pragmatic presupposition and presupposition triggers to business conference speeches from the perspective of function, which will promote feasible suggestions for the process of drafting and delivering speeches by adopting quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis. In this thesis, a self-built corpus of business conference speeches about70million words, which consists of82pieces of APEC speeches from APEC official website ranging from August2006to August2011, is the research subject. The self-built corpus is analyzed from the perspective of presupposition function, data being obtained by the statistical tool AntConc and SPSS to conclude the functions of pragmatic presupposition-cohesion, informativeness and economy, and seven functions of presupposition triggers (cohesion, emphasizing, projecting information focus, providing new information, providing more information, economy and expressing attitude) in APEC business conference speeches in order to improve deliverers’abilities of adopting presupposition.