A Comparative Study Of Presupposition Triggers In English And Chinese Corporation Profiles

Presupposition phenomenon was firstly put forward by Frege in 1892 and it has been adapted in many kinds of corpus,most of which were in courtroom,teaching,interview,etc.Few scholars have researched the presupposition in corporation profiles.But nowadays,corporation profiles have become a good way to advertise corporations themselves.Profiles not only present corporations' internal image,but also provide a platform for customers,investors and potential partners to know the corporation.Thus,the research on presupposition triggers in corporation profiles is not only a kind of extension to the study on both presupposition theory and corporation profiles,but also,to some extent,can help people compose or understand corporation profiles from a new perspective.This thesis aims to discover the use and the functions of presupposition triggers in both American and Chinese corporation profiles.The author tries to analyze the overall usage of presupposition triggers in corporation profiles,the similarities and differences of presupposition triggers between the American and Chinese corporation profiles,and the detailed functions of presupposition triggers in these corporation profiles.As for the ways of classification for presupposition triggers,considering that English and Chinese are two different languages,the categories of presupposition triggers for the American corporation profiles are Levinson's 13 types in his book Pragmatics,while the categories of presupposition triggers for the Chinese corporation profiles are chosen from Wang Yueping's book The Study on Chinese Presupposition.In this thesis,quantitative and qualitative analysis are applied to study the use of presupposition triggers in Chinese and American corporation profiles and make comparison of them.To do quantitative analysis,two small corpora respectively with 50 Chinese and 50 American corporation profiles selected from Fortune Global 500,2016 are established.The software Ant Conc is applied to count the number and frequency of presupposition triggers in these 100 corporation profiles.Based on the use of presupposition triggers,the author tries to find out the potential pragmatic functions of presupposition triggers in corporation profiles and make contrastive studies between the American and the Chinese corporation profiles.The findings of this thesis are as follows.Firstly,presupposition triggers are frequently applied in both the American and the Chinese corporation profiles,each having 9 kinds of presupposition triggers.Secondly,there are much more differences than similarities in the number and frequency of each kind of presupposition triggers between the Chinese and the American corporation profiles.Thirdly,the functions of presupposition triggers in the Chinese and the American corporation profiles are analyzed in detail.It is found that in the Chinese and the American corporation profiles,presupposition triggers function differently.Last but not least,the author suggests enlarging the corpus to make more precise and convinced study.The author believes that with in-depth study,more influential factors can be found are worthy of further discussion.Besides,since presupposition triggers are frequently applied in corporation profiles and there are many differences between the American and the Chinese corporation profiles,the author suggests taking presupposition into consideration when writing and translating a corporation profile.