Presupposition's Application In Chinese Study And The Methods For Distilling It

Presupposition is an objective and pervasive phenomenon in natural language. The phenomenon has long been concern of philosophers, linguists, since it was first Introduced in 1892 by the German philosopher Gottlob Frege in his On sense and reference. In 1950s' English philosopher P.F.Strawson inherited and developed Frege's thought, introduced presupposition into linguistics, hence this concept has been the important task in the linguistic study. Different studies given by different schools benefit the understanding of this concept, making the studies of this topic complicated as well. So this paper wants to sort out and classify these theories and to give a specific definition to this term.This paper comprises six parts, the first part is the introduction, and the second part expands the main theories about presupposition from the semantic, pragmatic and cognitive viewpoints. The third part introduces the application of the presupposition to Chinese study. The forth part deals with the limitation of Negation Test for Presupposition, and analyses the main reason for its limitation and sums up several methods of distilling the presupposition from linguistic form. The fifth part discusses the essence of presupposition. A conclusion is draw in the last part, and it points out that presupposition should be studied from multi-subjects.