A Study Of Presupposition Triggers In APEC Business Conference Speeches

In the past years,the scholars at home and abroad have mainly studied business conference speeches from the perspectives of techniques,stylistics and genre analysis,etc.However,few studies on presupposition triggers were conducted in business conference speeches.Therefore,it is necessary to study the types of presupposition triggers(including their frequencies)and their functions in APEC business conference speeches from the perspective of presupposition.40 pieces of speeches were selected from the APEC official website and a corpus of APEC business conference speeches was built.And based on their classifications of presupposition triggers of Levinson,Yule and Verschueren,this thesis will analyze presupposition triggers in APEC business conference speeches on lexical and syntactic levels through linguistic analysis tool AntConc.The results show that among the types of presupposition triggers at lexical level,restrictive expressions are most frequently used ones.Among the verbs used as presupposition triggers,factive verbs are most frequently used;among the types of presupposition triggers at syntactic level,comparative structures are most frequently used.And lexical presupposition triggers are more frequently used than syntactic presupposition triggers.What's more,the reason why the frequencies of presupposition triggers are different is that the characteristics of the presupposition triggers themselves are distinct.Besides,these presupposition triggers have at least four functions: enlarging information;shifting information focus;making speeches cohesive and coherent;making speeches concise.And one type of presupposition triggers can have more than one function.