An Analysis Of Pragmatic Presupposition In Hillary Clinton’s First Public Speech For The 58^th American Presidential Campaign

The German philosopher G.Frege first put forward the concept of"presupposition" in the article "Meaning and Reference" in 1892.It was officially accepted by western linguistic circles,and it became one of the hot topic and focus in the field of semantics and pragmatics in 1960s.In the 1970s,presupposition had been the hot topic discussed by linguists in the field of pragmatics,scholars made an intensive study of the definition and characteristics of presupposition.In 1970,Stalnaker formally put forward the concept of "pragmatic supposition".With the deepening understanding of pragmatic presupposition,people begin to pay much attention to the interrelation between pragmatic presupposition and discourse information,and find that pragmatic presupposition has inseparable connection in such aspects as the discourse coherence,communicative views.The speaker mainly expresses his true intentions implicitly with the help of the concealment,subjectivity of pragmatic presupposition,and economy,the information highlighting function of pragmatic presupposition in the process of giving a speech.This thesis selects Hillary Clinton’s First Public Speech for the 58th American Presidential Campaign as the research material,and chooses Chinese scholar He Ziran’s definition of pragmatic presupposition toidentify pragmatic presupposition in the selected speech;chooses Zhi Yongbi’s reclassification of pragmatic presupposition in political speech as pragmatic classification criterion to classify pragmatic presupposition in the selected speech;then uses functional discourse analysis steps to carry out specific analysis of pragmatic presuppositions;with characteristics of pragmatic presupposition summarized by Tian Miao and the functions of pragmatic presupposition summarized by Wei Zaijiang to analyze the impact of pragmatic presupposition on speaker’s intention and how pragmatic presupposition help the speaker to achieve her purpose.It can be concluded that pragmatic presupposition exists in Hillary Clinton’s First Public Speech for the 58th American Presidential Campaign and can be summarized as pragmatic presupposition at phonemic level,pragmatic presupposition at lexical semantic level and pragmatic presupposition at syntactical level specifically.Pragmatic presupposition at phonemic level mainly stresses "now" and "you","yesterday","are","each other",and "she","your","four fights" and other words or phrases to emphasize information focus;pragmatic presupposition at lexical semantic level mainly uses determinative description words "the","this","all","each" and factual verbs such as "know",implicit verb "promise" and repeated word meaning"too","again","twice" to make the speech concise,avoid tedious;pragmatic presupposition at syntactical level mainly use conditional sentences,adversative sentences and interrogative sentence to arouse the audience to think and to attract their attention.With the help of the concealment,subjectivity characteristics and economy function,information highlighting function,cohesion and coherence function of pragmatic presupposition,these pragmatic presuppositions can enable the speaker to convey her own viewpoint to the audience fully and agitated the audience so as to realize her goal of giving the speech.