A Study On Pragmatic Presuppositions And Presupposition Triggers In Foreign News Reports On China’s September 3^rd Military Parade

With the development of linguistics, studies on the pragmatic presupposition in different texts become more and more. Currently, studies on pragmatic presupposition have mainly discussed various classifications of presupposition, the functions pragmatic presupposition performed in different texts. The present study focuses on three aspects of the pragmatic presupposition in military news discourse, namely the function of presupposition and the use of presupposition triggers both on lexical level and syntactic level. Three research questions are asked: 1) What functions are performed by the pragmatic presuppositions in the foreign news reports on China’s September 3rd military parade? 2) How are the presupposition triggers at lexical level been used in the foreign news reports on China’s September 3rd military parade? 3) How are the presupposition triggers at syntactic level been used in the foreign news reports on China’s September 3rd military parade?The present study chooses eight foreign news reports on China’s September 3rd military parade as the data. In order to ensure the quality and representativeness of the data, we choose some major English media such as The New York Times, The Reuters, and so on. After the analysis of the data, 367 pragmatic presuppositions are obtained, which include 279 presuppositions of lexical level triggers and 88 presuppositions of syntactic level triggers.There are five major findings. First, as far as the functions of pragmatic presupposition are concerned, we find that in our data the function of information transmitting is achieved through pragmatic presupposition. Presupposition helps transmit background information to readers who lack the previous knowledge via the presupposed parts. Second, the function of euphemistically expressing can be realized by presupposition in our data. By presupposition, the reporters’ implied intentions or altitudes toward the military-related things can be euphemistically expressed. Third, the function of text cohesion achieving also can be realized through the pragmatic presupposition in our data. Presupposition also can function as one kind of text organization strategies to make the news reports cohesive and concise. Fourth, the uses of presupposition triggers at lexical level show an obvious unbalanced distribution in which definite descriptions are the highest in frequency among all lexical triggers and verbs of judging as presupposition triggers are rarely used. Fifth, the uses of presupposition triggers at syntactic level also indicate an unbalanced distribution. Comparisons and contrasts as one of the syntactic level of presupposition triggers are often used in the news reports to convey the reporters’ attitudes and to achieve textual cohesion. Cleft sentences and counterfactual conditionals are rarely used. These two kinds of presupposition triggers are belong to the sentence structure which used to express personal feelings or moods. News reports are supposed to account facts objectively. Hence, the feature of the uses of cleft sentences and counterfactual conditional as presupposition triggers is coincide with the characteristics of news reports texts.