Study Of Pragmatic Presuppositions Of TED Business Speeches

In this ever-changing world,international trade and business are two essential subjects that have never changed.To tangle complicated international problems,to make a great contribution to the word's progress,and to put China on the map of the world,potent China's voice is needed.TED(technology,entertainment,design)business speeches,a golden mine worthy of being explored,have been drawing increasing attention from scholars and listeners all over the world.The analysis of the linguistic strategies in TED isthus of great importance,which can cast light on the understanding and creation of business public speeches.Initially being put forward by Germen philosopher Frege,the theory of presuppositions was introduced into philosophy,and then adopted to the region of semantics.Until 1970 s,scholars marriedpresuppositions and pragmatic field,opening a new gatefor both pragmatic study and presuppositions principle.As a language strategy,pragmatic presuppositions can be adopted to imply speakers' unstated meaning.This study is aimed to unveil the magic of TED business speeches and shed light on the development of pragmatic presuppositions.A larger than 190,000 words' corpus was built based on the transcript of 82 TED business speeches from TED official website throughout the period from February 2009 to November 2016.All the associateddata in business region were gleaned strictly based on official website's classification.With the AntConc and Excel as research instruments,guided by the triggers theory of Levinson and classification of pragmatic presuppositions of ZhiYongbi,this study was conducted from two aspects: explicitly pragmatic presuppositions and implicitly fictitious pragmatic presuppositions.The research yields that(1)By explicitly pragmatic presuppositions dimension,there are two levels: lexical level and syntactical level.On lexical level,change-of-state verbs and restrictive words are the most frequently employed construction;on syntactical level,presuppositions triggers as comparisons and contracts construction,cleft sentences,and questions are pervasive.(2)By implicitly fictitious pragmatic presuppositionsdimension,subjective information provided by the speakers,in which subjective content of mind and the perception and personal perspective played vital parts.Moreover,subversion of mutual knowledge was adopted,including the subversion of culture and common sense;in addition,the subversion of appropriateness was also widely adopted to imply speakers' intended meaning.(3)The purposes of using pragmatic presuppositions in TED business speeches lie infacilitating the coherence of speeches,and diversifying sentences;shifting focuses,and emphasizing information;manipulating audiences by powerful discourses and carefully worded questions,distorting audiences' memories,arousing audiences' vigilance,curiosity,and other emotion,and attracting audience's attention;creating urgent or active atmosphere,achieving humor effect and ultimately persuading,informing and inspiring audiences;leading in examples,stories,or topics and raising problems in an euphemistic way;This study was conducted from multidimensions and contributed to enlarging and broadening the research area of business public speeches as well as pragmatic presuppositions.Practical suggestions were provided at the end of the thesis.The author of this study hopes that the research can facilitate listenersgaining a better understanding of the implied meaning of the business speeches,and can castlight on the writing and translation of speeches in this filed.