An Analysis Of Rogge’s Addresses On The2008and2012Olympic Games From The Perspective Of Presupposition Triggers

The Olympic Games is a sporting feast of global concern. As a necessary part of theOlympic Games, the addresses, delivered by President of the International OlympicCommittee and its national leaderships on the opening ceremonies are always compelling andreacted strongly. Most of these addresses are included in the ranks of celebrities’ speeches,talked about or even emulated. Therefore, the study of Olympic addresses, especiallyaddresses by the President of the International Olympic Committee is of great significance.Among these brilliant addresses, these by Jacques Rogge, President of International OlympicCommittee, on the2008and2012Olympic Games’ opening ceremonies are very typical.Presupposition, also known as the premise, was first put forth in1892by Frege, theGerman philosopher and founder of modern logic. Since the1960s, presupposition has beenintroduced as an important concept in linguistics, and then developed into semantics andpragmatics, becoming one of the basic research topics in these subdisciplines. Presuppositionis derived from certain words, phrase, sentence, or some kind of context. Since these languageitems can trigger presuppositions, they are called presupposition triggers.Address is a special kind of discourse, for it combines the characteristics of writtendiscourse and spoken language and is suitable for different occasions. From the existingliterature, the applications of pragmatic presupposition are mainly in the field of translation,news, advertising, law, trial, foreign language teaching and so on, whereas less researchfocuses on the study of address. This article will make an analysis of the addresses by Roggeon2008and2012Olympic Games from the perspective of pragmatic presupposition, tryingto gain an in-depth understanding of their meanings and revealing the features of such kind ofaddresses and analyzing the functions of pragmatic presupposition triggers used within those addresses.This paper tries to apply presupposition theories in contrastive analysis of Englishaddresses by Rogge in the opening ceremonies of the2008and2012Olympic Games. Themethodologies of the thesis are mainly quantitative research and qualitative research. Thequantitative research is used in the process of analyzing the database, including collecting andclassifying each kind of presupposition triggers and finally counting their frequency in theaddresses. The qualitative research plays a basic role in this study, which is mainly applied toanalyze the addresses, illustrate the functions of the presuppositions triggers used in theaddresses, summarize the features of this sort of addresses and the pragmatic functions of theaddresses as the whole. On the one hand, the thesis will prove that as one sort of particularaddresses, these addresses contain abundant presupposition triggers. Thus it proves thesignificance of presupposition theories in addresses and embodies their great explanativeforce. It also proves that presupposition theories are good tools to investigate and analyzediscourse. On the other hand, the paper proves that surroundings have great influence on theaddresser’s speeches and in turn, the addresser’s speeches can inflect his awareness of hisown living surroundings and also his awareness of exotic societies. Researching the pragmaticexpressions in the Olympic opening speeches has an important and positive meaning topragmatic studies, the understanding of the spirit of the Olympic Games as well as our reallife.