| Detective reasoning story occupies an important part in literary works which israther popular among readers. Edgar Allan Poe, an excellent American writer, hasinitiated the modern detective reasoning stories. He is the earliest founder of detectivenovels. The inferential models and plots in his stories are always imitated by otherwriters which become the typical example of reasoning story.Presupposition is the known information which is not asserted by the addresser butexpressed in the communicative process. Pragmatic presupposition is the study ofpresupposition concept from pragmatic perspective. It refers to the prerequisite ofeffective verbal behavior or the speaker’s assumption of the linguistic environment.Presupposition, especially pragmatic presupposition, is often used to study variouslinguistic phenomena. Reasoning story is widely concerned due to its amazing plot andthe detective’s superb inferential capability and skill. At present, most researches ofreasoning stories are from literary angle, while the pragmatic researches are relativelyless. Pragmatic presupposition plays an important role in detective reasoning stories. It isan effective measure for the writer to set suspense and attract readers.Based upon previous researches about detective reasoning stories, this thesisattempts to relate the fundamental theory of pragmatic presupposition to literary works.It studies personal presupposition, addressee presupposition, context presupposition andbackground presupposition in Edgar Allan Poe’s detective reasoning stories. This thesisselects five of Edgar Allan Poe’s reasoning stories, namely The Murders in the RueMorgue, The Mystery of Marie Roget, The Gold-Bug, Thou Art the Man and ThePurloined Letter, as corpus to explore the application and function of pragmaticpresupposition in this kind of stories through case analysis. Edgar Allan Poe frequentlyemployed pragmatic presupposition in his reasoning stories, which not only makes thelanguage concise and the information prominent but also makes the inferenceconvincible. The analysis of pragmatic presupposition in reasoning stories reveals thedetective’s rigorous inferential process, which in turn reflects Edgar Allan Poe’s ingenuity.The analysis of reasoning stories from the perspective of pragmatic presuppositiontheory both enriches the corpus of presupposition research and provides new areas ofreasoning story study. As for the readers, pragmatic presupposition helps them tocomprehend the author’s writing skill and the contextual structure of the story better and enhance their problem-analyzing and language-applying abilities. |
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