A Study Of Presupposition Triggers In American And Chinese Newspaper Editorials

This thesis is a study on the application of presupposition triggers in American and Chinese-English newspaper editorials. Presupposition has been studied by philosophers and linguists for centuries. The concept of presupposition was first put forward by German philosopher Gottlob Frege in his work on Sense and Reference and was later studied by Bertrand Russell and Peter F. Strawson. Benefiting from semantic theory, the study of presupposition has been fruitful in the1960s and1970s. However, semantics fails to give reasonable explanation for the defeasibility and projection problem, therefore, linguists, such as Edward L. Keenan, Lauri Karttunen and Robert C. Stalnaker started to resort to the pragmatic perspective to study presupposition.Presupposition is always associated with particular words or surface structure. These linguistic items which can cause presuppositions are called presupposition triggers, which are the focal points of this research. Stephen C. Levinson listed13presupposition triggers:definite descriptions, factive verbs, implicative verbs, change of state verbs, iteratives, verbs of judging, temporal clauses, cleft sentences, implicit clefts with stressed constituents, comparisons and contrasts, non-restrictive relative clauses, counterfactual conditionals and questions.Listeners or readers can easily fall into the trap set by speakers or writers due to the implicitness of presupposition. Newspaper editorial writers tend to take advantage of this linguistic property of newspaper editorial and create bias to manipulate reader’s opinion. The aim of this thesis is to identify the linguistic features of presupposition in newspaper editorial. Therefore, forty editorials were selected from two American and two Chinese-English newspapers, namely, the New York Times, the Birmingham News, China Daily and the Global Times. AntConc corpus tool is adopted to find out and analyze the presupposition triggers in the four newspapers.This thesis shows that American and Chinese-English newspaper editorials are similar in the frequency of using presupposition triggers. Definite description, comparison and contrast are the most frequently used presupposition triggers, while implicative verb, change of state verb, cleft sentence, iteratives, factive verb and counterfactual conditional are less frequently used. The presupposition triggers in newspaper editorials can make the text coherent and concise, conceal the speaker or writer’s purpose and transfer sentential focus.