AnAnalysisofPresuppositionTriggersinPoliticalSpeeches..doc

An Analysis of Presupposition Triggers in Political Speeches CONTENTS ABSTRACT 1 摘要 1 Chapter One INTRODUCTION 2 Chapter Two LITERATURE REVIEW 3 2.1 Studies on Presupposition 3 2.1.1 Philosophical origin 3 2.1.2 Semantic Pragmatic presupposition 3 2.2 Studies on Presupposition Triggers 4 2.2.1 Definition Classifications 4 2.2.2 Analysis 4 Chapter Three PRESUPPOSITION TRIGGERS IN POLITICAL SPEECHES5 3.1 Analysis of Lexical presupposition triggers 5 3.1.1 Definite descriptions 5 3.1.2 Verb classes 5 3.1.3 Words of repeated meaning 6 3.2 Analysis of Syntactic presupposition triggers 6 3.2.1 Temporal clauses 6 3.2.2 Cleft sentences 6 3.2.3 Questions 6 Chapter Four CONCLUSION 7 Works Cited 8 2.1 Studies on Presupposition Presupposition is not only a very important issue in the logic of natural language, but also an important topic in the philosophical study of language. It was put forward by Gottlob Frege, a German mathematician and logician. In the philosophy of language, the study of presupposition has largely been confined to debates about the nature of reference and referring expressions. In linguistics, on the other hand, the investigation of presupposition is concerned with a much wider range of phenomena, centering around the general debates about the interaction and division of labor between semantics and pragmatics. For example, “The queen of England is old.” and ”England has a queen.” When we analyze the presupposition of these two sentences from semantic presupposition and pragmatic presupposition, we can get that ”England has a queen” is the semantic presupposition, regardless of the value of existence and the proposition’s true and false. However, from the aspect of pragmatic presupposition, presupposition refers to premise relations of relief, attitude and intention about context and speak object. For example, the sentence of “Please open the door”, which presupposes “the door is open”, “the speaker the door can be closed” , “the listener has the ability