A Study Of Pragmatic Presupposition In Diplomatic Language Based On Relevance-Adaptation Model

The Foreign Ministry Press Conferences of PRC,as important diplomatic activities,are regularly held by Chinese government and in which the spokespersons will stand for Chinese government to answer diplomatic questions put forward by reporters all over the world.Diplomatic language,as the language form used in diplomacy,plays an indispensable role in diplomatic activities.As a particular kind of diplomatic language,the spokespersons' remarks toward all the questions are important and helpful to build a good national image,protect the legitimate rights and interest of China and maintain harmonious multilateral relationship with other countries in the world.Therefore,it is necessary for spokespersons to master some effective communicative strategies to answer tough questions and even deal with some unexpected occasions.Various researches on diplomatic language are carried out from different perspectives,such as translation,pragmatics,cognition etc.The spokespersons' remarks,as special forms of diplomatic language,are mainly studied in the fields of translation and pragmatics etc.As for the communicative strategies used by spokespersons,pragmatic presupposition owns the particular and irreplaceable functions which should not be ignored in properly conveying communicative intentions and achieving special communicative purposes.These previous researches contribute a lot to the exploration of diplomatic language as well as pragmatic presupposition,but there are still some limitations.First,the practical research of pragmatic presupposition applied in diplomatic language especially in spokespersons' remarks lacks much attention.Next,few studies on the spokespersons' remarks are carried out based on the Relevance-Adaptation Model.In order to deal with the limitations of the previous researches mentioned above,the present research focuses on exploring the pragmatic presupposition in diplomatic language especially take the China Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying's remarks in 2016 as analytical cases.In addition,this paper applies the Relevance-Adaptation Model proposed by professor Yang Ping(2001)as the theoretical framework.This model absorbs the merits of both the Relevance Theory and Adaptation Theory and would be more scientific in analyzing the pragmatic presupposition in diplomatic language especially in spokespersons' remarks.Specifically,this thesis majors in analyzing the linguistic manifestation,generative process and the communicative functions of pragmatic presupposition in the China Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying's remarks based on the Relevance-Adaptation Model.Firstly,the pragmatic presupposition is manifested by presupposition triggers.Presupposition triggers refer to some particular words and syntactic structures which can clearly indicate presuppositions.In this paper,the presupposition triggers at lexical level mainly include imperatives,factive verbs,change-of-state verbs,verbs of judging,repetitive words,comparatives and the ones at syntactical level mainly consist of temporal clauses,comparative structures,counterfactual conditionals,cleft sentences and non-restrictive clauses.Next,from the perspective of the Relevance-Adaptation Model,the pragmatic presupposition in the spokesperson's remarks is formed through seeking relevance and making adaptations to communicative contexts.From the perspective of utterance generation,the spokesperson aims to seek optimal relevance through making judgments about the addressees' cognitive abilities,preferences etc.and forms the optimal relevance presumptions through dynamically adapting to communicative contexts including physical,social and mental worlds.The optimal relevance presumption should be worthy of addressees' efforts to deal with and further it will determine the pragmatic strategies applied in the communicative process.The pragmatic strategy researched in this thesis is just the pragmatic presupposition.Last,pragmatic presupposition used in different contexts could cause different communicative functions.In the spokesperson's remarks,the application of pragmatic presupposition would also be of great values,such as to enhance the tactfulness of spokesperson's remarks,to protect legitimate diplomatic interest of China and to maintain harmonious multilateral relationship with other countries in the world.Totally speaking,this paper is specialized in the research of pragmatic presupposition in diplomatic language especially in the China Foreign Ministry spokesperson's remarks.This paper is of great importance in the applied research of pragmatic presupposition in diplomatic language especially in China Foreign Ministry spokesperson's remarks.In addition,this study is valuable for the pragmatic research of diplomatic language as well as the further scientific application of the Relevance-Adaptation Model.