A Study Of Motivations Of Pragmatic Presupposition Triggered By Nominalization In The Political News Discourse

In today’s information times, the newspapers and periodicals are playing a moreand more important role in people’s life. The news in the newspaper promptly reportsthe latest and valuable facts at home and abroad without delay by means of generalnarration and simplified brief words. In particular, the political news focuses on thecountry’s fundamental policy and international situation, which exerts great influenceon public’s lives. In the light of the objectivity of political news, some clauses ofdifferent processes will be packaged into a noun group, so the use of nominalizationbecome one of the distinctive features of political news discourse. However, with theprocess of nominalization, the “process” and “thing” being combined together resultedin the loss of some information; to be more precise, the information is not lost, buthidden as the pragmatic presupposition. To understand correctly the pragmaticpresupposition of nominalization could contribute to our comprehension to the deepstructure and implied political connotations of political news.The scholars of different schools in Traditional Grammar, Structural Grammar,Transformation-Generative Grammar, Systemic Functional Grammar and CognitiveGrammar respectively carried on the detailed study of nominalization; in addition,from such points as definition, characteristics, classification, application and so on, thestudies of pragmatic presupposition made great progress; however, the researches ofpragmatic presupposition based on nominalization are quite rare, especially the studyof motivations of pragmatic presupposition triggered by nominalization in a particulardiscourse.This thesis attempts to conduct a study of motivations of pragmatic presuppositiontriggered by nominalization in the political news discourse. Taking the grammaticalmetaphor and nominalization, pragmatic presupposition as well as transitivity systemof functional grammar as the theoretical framework, and on the basis of65pieces ofpolitical news in China with nominal patterns of the total of30issues selected from thepolitics section of China Daily in2013.12-2014.2, the author adopts the qualitative andquantitative methods to study the following questions: (1) In what ways do the nominal patterns realize pragmatic presupposition inpolitical news discourse?(2) What frequency does the clauses of different processes being nominalized inthe genre of political news?(3) What effects does the pragmatic presupposition of nominalization have in thepolitical news?Research results:(1)nominalization can realize pragmatic presupposition bycombining the “process” and “thing” of different processes;(2) The clauses of materialprocess being nominalized in the genre of political news accounts for a largeproportion; while the clauses of behavioral process being nominalized in the genre ofpolitical news are only few.(3)The pragmatic presupposition of nominalizationachieves the effects of thingness, abstraction, condensation and fuzziness.