| The news headline is considered as “the eye of the news”,and a good news headline can catch readers' attention immediately and from the headline,readers can grasp the meaning of the text(Bonyadi & Samuel,2012).Due to the principle of communicative economy(Horn,1984),pragmatic presupposition,as an effective language strategy,is always applied in news writing.The research on pragmatic presupposition has been conducted from various perspectives;however,they are mainly studied from the perspective of writers with rare attention paid to readers' understanding of pragmatic presupposition(Zeng,2012).Besides,many English learners can improve their English by reading English news,but in most cases,readers would be hindered from comprehending what they read effectively if they could not understand the pragmatic presupposition which is widely used in headlines.Therefore,the current research examines English learners' understanding of pragmatic presupposition in English news headlines.This thesis performed a detailed analysis of the types,functions of pragmatic presupposition and the extent to which English learners were able to identify them.Three hundred news headlines were selected between August and November in2018 from six official websites(China Daily,The New York Times,Washington Post,The Guardian,CNBC,and USA Today).The study showed that:(1)The majority of the students could detect pragmatic presupposition in news headlines.However,students at the doctoral level showed better understanding of presupposed meanings in the headlines than students at the Master's level,and the former were on a par with professors probably because their better grasp of the culture and background knowledge embedded in the new headlines.(2)Pragmatic presupposition could be classified into seven types in news headlines,namely,factive,behavior,state,belief,culture,position and rhetorical presupposition.(3)Informative and aesthetic function were the major functions of pragmatic presupposition in English news headlines. |
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