Presupposition On English Editorials Of China Daily

Editorial, as one of the most common genres of news, is a main media for the press to express opinions, attitudes and views about the current events and problems at home and abroad. Editors often employ various strategies to convey a large amount of information and to give comments in concise and accurate ways. Presupposition, as one of the effective and influential language strategies, is frequently employed by editors to achieve their goals. Nowadays, many previous studies have given due attention to presupposition, especially to its application in various fields. However,although called by Pulitzer as the “heart of newspaper”, editorials have rarely been studied from the perspective of presupposition.This thesis conducts the presupposition analysis in the editorials of China Daily.Based on the theories of presupposition proposed by scholars both home and abroad,the present study is conducted mainly adopting Levinson’s categories of presupposition triggers, with reference to Verschueren’s and He Z. R.’s classifications.It analyzes presuppositions at two levels: lexical and syntactical, based on the distributions of presupposition triggers, types and functions of presuppositions used in the editorials of China Daily. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are used to analyze presuppositions in the sixty-five editorials randomly selected between June2014 and June 2015 from the official website of China Daily.The findings are as follows:(1) presuppositions are widely used in the editorials,which demonstrate their importance as a language device in editorials.(2) Four types of presuppositions are commonly employed in the editorials: existential presupposition, factive presupposition, belief presupposition and cultural presupposition.(3) The use of presuppositions in the editorials can contribute to the cohesion and coherence of the texts, the brevity and conciseness of the texts and the information focus of the texts.