A Pragmatic Study Of Presupposition In TV Talk Shows

Since the middle of20thcentury, talk show has been gradually accepted by people and itspopularity increases rapidly. The Ellen Show has been aired for more than ten years and it isone of the most popular talk shows in the United States of America. Studies on talk showshave become a rising trend recent years though they are a relatively new field of research.Lots of researches focus on talk show from the perspectives of conversational implicature,turns management strategies, probing speech act, etc. Few researches on talk show are carriedout from the aspect of pragmatic presupposition.The data are drawn from ten episodes from the videos downloaded from internet. Thispaper intends to look into The Ellen Show from the perspective of pragmatic presuppositionand give analysis to the application and function of pragmatic presupposition andpresupposition triggers in The Ellen Show. In this paper, firstly, the author will review brieflythe theory of presupposition and the history of talk show so as to give a general picture of thepresupposition theory and talk show history as well as The Ellen Show. Then he would like togo over briefly the research status of presupposition and previous studies on talk show. Next,both quantitative and qualitative analysis would be carried out based on the data collected.Data analysis shows that pragmatic presupposition is widely distributed in the corpus andthere are twelve types of presupposition triggers with high frequency including definitedescriptions, factive verbs, implicative verbs, change of state verbs, iteratives, verbs ofjudging, mood adverbs, adverbial clauses of time, cleft sentences, comparison and contraststructures, non-restrictive attributive clauses and questions. Among all these presuppositiontriggers, definite description takes the largest percentage, others according percentage arefactive verbs, questions, adverbial clauses of time, iteratives and change of state verbs. Thispaper illustrates the twelve types of presupposition triggers based on the corpus.Different presupposition triggers may trigger different pragmatic presuppositions. Thispaper concludes three types of pragmatic presupposition based on data analysis. They are,according their frequency in the corpus, existential presupposition, lexical presupposition andstructural presupposition.This paper concludes four functions of presupposition in the talk show: building a friendly relationship, creating humors, emotional function and highlighting people’s merits.