Contrastive Study Of Presupposition In Chinese And English From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Presupposition has been proposed by the German philosopher Frege. At first, people have studied the item of presupposition in the semantic level. They think presupposition is a kind of surface structure of the language, and a kind of phenomenon of language. With the development of deep research, linguists find that some problems of the presupposition can not be solved by semantics. Therefore, the pragmatics enter into the area of presupposition, the research of the presupposition has become diverse. The present research indicates that semantic presupposition and pragmatic presupposition are different ways of the study, and they can not be separated, but coexist and complement each other. Semantic presupposition is the foundation of pragmatic presupposition, and pragmatic presupposition is the external expression of the semantic presupposition.In the past researches, linguists have studied the presupposition phenomenon deeply; however, there are few researches about the contrast study of the presupposition. This thesis mainly studies the presupposition in the perspective of relevance theory, discussing the representation of presupposition in the context of Chinese and English. The aim of this analysis of the contrast is to make people with different background have comprehensive understanding of the different presupposition. Therefore, it can make the communication in the utterance more smoothly and the communication of the different background could be processed effectively.Based on the relevance theory this thesis analyzes the construction of the presupposition in the utterance and how to achieve the best effort of the expression by the optimal relevance. The main contents of the thesis study are as following:First, the phenomenon of the presupposition is studied in detail; we distinguished the concept of assertion, entailment, implicature and some other similar terms. We reclassify the presupposition and presupposition triggers.Second, we study the relevance theory deeply, analyze the representation of the presupposition in the perspective of relevance theory, and discuss the relation of the presupposition and the cognitive relevance. What’s more, we definite the relevant characters of the pragmatic presupposition and the cognitive context. At the same time, we explain the relation of the presupposition and the expectation of the relevance. In the verbal communication, we should design the satisfied factor of the presupposition and the main condition which makes the communication smoothly.Third, this thesis makes the contrastive study to the presupposition of the discourse in English and Chinese. It mainly makes the contrastive study of triggers in English and Chinese, the contrastive study of phenomenon of the presupposition and the representation of presupposition in Chinese high context and in English low context. The study indicates that the representation of the presupposition has the difference between high context in Chinese and low context in English. The reason is that the different culture and knowledge background make a profound influence. From the perspective of the relevance theory, the different representation of the presupposition is related to the context and the relevant factor and the optimal relevance.This research of the thesis has certain significance both in theory and practice.In the aspect of theory, we discuss the presupposition in the perspective of relevance theory and the different representation of presupposition in Chinese high context and in English low context. These ideas provide the new perspective for the study of this subject. In the aspect of practice, this thesis makes the contrast to the presupposition of the discourse in English and Chinese, and analyzes the different characters of the representation of presupposition and the varied culture of the Chinese high context and English low context. These will supply certain revelation for the intercultural study and culture research.