A Study Of The Pragmatic Presupposition In Political Discourse

Politics cannot live without language,since politics and language have close relationships.The language used in the political activities by parties,governments and political statesmen or stateswomen is political language or political discourse.Political discourse includes a lot of language skills.Presupposition is an important language phenomenon and language strategy in political discourse.Presupposition is also called precondition.It plays an indispensable role in political speeches.The speaker often uses the pragmatic presupposition strategy to hide or avoid some important information in order to achieve his or her political purposes and intentions.Rex Tillerson is Secretary of State of the United States.His political discourse includes a lot of pragmatic presupposition phenomena.Thus,it is very important and useful to analyze pragmatic presupposition in his political discourse.The author uses Zhi Yongbi's pragmatic presupposition theory in political discourse and critical discourse analysis to analyze Tillerson's political discourse from the perspective of explicit pragmatic presupposition and implicit pragmatic presupposition.The author selects235 of his speeches to study the distribution and frequency of different presupposition triggers in his political discourse,explores his political purposes of using pragmatic presupposition,and summarizes the functions of pragmatic presupposition in his political discourse.The study shows that the use of syntactic presupposition triggers is the highest,and the percentage is 57.205 %.The frequency of pragmatic presupposition triggered by temporal clauses is30.095 %.And the percentage of lexical presupposition triggers is 42.795 %,and the frequency of pragmatic presupposition triggered by factive verbs is 32.741% in the explicit pragmatic presupposition.In the aspect of implicit pragmatic presupposition,he uses a lot of evaluative words at lexical level.In fact,the percentage of evaluative nouns is 33.307%,the frequency of evaluative verbs is 6.106 %,and the percentage of evaluative adjectives is60.587%.At syntactic level,he uses undefined nominatums and negative structures to realizeimplicit evaluative pragmatic presupposition.He ensures American hegemony and interests,maintains American international image,and transmits American ideology by using pragmatic presupposition.At the same time,he realizes the functions of information focuses,discourse control,and euphemism and dissimulation with help of presupposition.It is hoped that this paper can enrich the studies of political discourse,and improve people' critical analysis abilities of pragmatic presupposition in political discourse so that people are able to explore the power relations,discourse control,political tendency,diplomatic policies and ideology when dealing with political discourse.