A Study On The Strategies Of Denying The Speaker’s Pragmatic Presupposition In The English Debate Competition

Presupposition has been the subject of interest for many scholars from differentdisciplines such as philosophy, rhetorics and pragmatics. Fruitful research results havebeen achieved, covering mainly two categories: what is the espistemological nature ofpresupposition itself and how presupposition influences the interpretation of theutterances, which are of great help for people to better understand presupposition andinterpret utterances in verbal communication. But in reality, there exists a special kindof speech act—debate, in which participants aim not only to interpret their counterpart’spresupposition and understand the utterances correctly, but to refute or to deny thepresupposition and win the debate. Up to now, no detailed literature has been found onthis field, thus this study attempts to do some research about it.As is known to all, presupposition refers to something the speaker assumes to betrue, and it is the precondition or basis for the appropriateness of the speaker’s utterance.Pragmatic Presupposition is closely related to the context factors of the utterances. If Apresupposes B, when B is true, A can either be true or false; when B is false, A has notruth-value at all. So, in debating, if someone succeeds in proving that his counterpart’spresupposition is false (by manipulating certain context factors), he will, very possibly,win the debate.The research examines seven sessions of National College English DebateCompetition and carefully selects those winning samples, in which all attacks start fromthe presupposition, as its corpus, and carries out an investigation in order to answer thefollowing questions:1. What are the pragmatic strategies that the listener employs to refute thespeaker’s pragmatic presupposition in English Debate Competition?2. How does the listener deny the speaker’s pragmatic presupposition with themanipulation of the factors in the context?Based on the achievements of previous researches done in relevant fields,especially those of presupposition and context, this research carefully examines eachsample from the data collected, working out the speaker’s pragmatic presupposition first,then trying to see how the listener denies it roughly, and finally defeats his counterpart.Then, the research analyzes the detailed procedure of how the listener denies the speaker’s pragmatic presupposition with the manipulation of the factors in the context.The results of the study indicate that the listener mainly employs two kinds of methodsto deny the speaker’s pragmatic presupposition. One is that the listener pretends toborrow the speaker’s pragmatic presupposition, at the same time he quickly changes thefactors of the speaker’s context, and finally he succeeds in proving that the speaker’spragmatic presupposition is false. The other is that the listener alters the speaker’spragmatic presupposition and adds new context factors to the pragmatic presuppositionwhich has been altered from the speaker’s pragmatic presupposition, finally making thespeaker’s original pragmatic presupposition unacceptable. In summary, the listenersuccessfully refutes the speaker’s pragmatic presupposition by manipulating of thelinguistic context factors, the situational context factors or the cultural context factors.This research, to some degree, can enrich the literature of pragmatic presupposition.It will help people to better understand pragmatic presupposition. It can also remind thedebaters of the importance of pragmatic presupposition in debating, and later on, ifpossible, helps them to make better use of it in their attacking or defending.