A Study On Presupposition In Pragmatic Ellipsis

Ellipsis, a dynamic pragmatic element, exists widely in daily conversations and variousregisters and discursive genres. It is context-dependent, recoverable and flexible. It canserve the purposes of cohesion, coherence and conciseness. The research on ellipsis has along tradition both in China and abroad. But previous studies on ellipsis have largely beenrestricted to syntactic, semantic or textual analysis and have had a static nature. However,ellipsis exists almost everywhere in our daily communication. To analyze this phenomenonby discussing its classification, function etc. on semantic level is not sufficient. During theprocess of verbal communication, syntax, semantics and pragmatics always associate witheach other. The change of one side must lead to the change of the other two. From dailyconversation, we can see that ellipsis depends largely on context. Therefore, ellipsis is atthe same time a pragmatic concern. Pragmatic ellipsis should be paid more attention to.This thesis tries to analyze ellipsis from the pragmatic perspective and thus concludes itsfeatures. Then, with the reference to presupposition theory, the properties and theunderstanding of presupposition in pragmatic ellipsis will be discussed.This thesis is conducted as a qualitative study, through which the nature of pragmaticellipsis will be elaborated and the process of inferring its presupposition will be clarified.The study reveals that presupposition is closely related to the clarity, accuracy, precisionand depth of an elliptical conversation. It evokes new information which will berecognized as the background information of the participants of a conversation. With the“mutual knowledge”, pragmatic presupposition ensures the process of communication andthus restores the elliptical part.Besides, this paper also noted the features of pragmatic ellipsis, which are communicativity, context-dependence, subjectivity and purposiveness. According to them,pragmatic ellipsis can be subdivided into subjective ellipsis, situational ellipsis and culturalellipsis. Thus, the basic properties of presupposition–felicity and common ground havetheir performance in each kind. In addition, existential presupposition and situationalpresupposition are discussed in detail, which are also applied in the analysis of pragmaticellipsis. As to the understanding of presupposition in pragmatic ellipsis, this paper hasdiscovered the interrelation between presupposition and context with the help of examples.Therefore, contextual inference of presupposition in pragmatic ellipsis is considered as anacceptable way of understanding.