Study On Unconventional Pragmatic Presupposition In Speech Communication

Pragmatic analysis of presupposition refers to define presupposition by exploiting prepositions or sentences. Mutual knowledge and contextual adaptation, which are two features of pragmatic presupposition, are widely accepted by academic circles. However, with the analysis built on speech conversation corpus, this thesis focuses on the presupposition that is not of mutual knowledge in speech communication. This kind of pragmatic presupposition is an unusual manipulation of presupposition, which is unknown, controversial or unacceptable for at least one party. For the convenience of argumentation, this phenomenon of pragmatic presupposition distinctive from conventional usage is defined as unconventional pragmatic presupposition by the author in this thesis. Unconventional pragmatic presupposition signifies much in the daily communication and in the research of presupposition theory. Reasonable explanations on the subjects related to unconventional pragmatic presupposition are made and the methods for its analysis are properly used in the process of speech communication, then the range and depth of linguistic research would be extended greatly. Besides, unconventional pragmatic presupposition, as one of the discourse strategies, is an important means by which people can realize communicative goal or predominance in speech communication. It is beneficial for the communication participants to understand the nature of unconventional pragmatic presupposition and employ them properly. Thus, the author considers practically meaningful an in-dept exploration of unconventional pragmatic presupposition. This paper is dedicated to the analysis of unconventional pragmatic presupposition in speech communication. This paper mainly concerns the innovations:First, two standards classifying unconventional pragmatic presupposition are put forward correspondingly according to two important principles from pragmatics. One classification based on "Cooperative Principles of Presupposition" can be defined as violation of the maxims of quantity, quality, relation and manner; the other on the basis of "Appropriateness Principles of Presupposition" is defined as failing to adapt to the contexts of cognition, situation and psychology. Second, manipulations of unconventional pragmatic presupposition, especially the intentional ones, are explained by using features of presupposition from the speaker's and the hearer's perspectives separately, to further investigate the accommodation of unconventional pragmatic presupposition in effective communication. In the light of the features of hidden nature, appropriateness, etc. the author considers that the hearer could take the initiative in adopting positive approaches to realize his communicative intentions. At last, the author make a comprehensive and in-depth study to discuss the pragmatic functions of unconventional pragmatic presupposition systematically from aspects of information function (adding,subtracting, highlighting), behavior function (implicature, induction, transfer, pragmatic ambivalence) and aesthetic function (persuasion, euphemism, politeness, humor) respectively, which proves the universality of unconventional pragmatic presupposition in speech communication. The author find that since unconventional pragmatic presupposition is sensitive to intentions, one utterance may convey different presuppositions for different intentions. The change of intention has influence on what the communicator presupposes in making an utterance; hence this has also influence on the communicator's interpretation of the utterance meaning and the pragmatic functions of their corresponding presuppositions. In a word, resorting to the subjects of unconventional pragmatic presupposition, can not only make the pragmatic presupposition theory more perfect, but also improve the ability to understand and apply the language in everyday life and be helpful to speech communications.