A Study On Pragmatic Presupposition In The English Translation Of The Corridors Of Power From The Perspective Of Cognitive Reference Point

Presupposition,also called premise or precondition,was first proposed by German philosopher Frege in 1892.Presupposition,referring to the assumption made by the speaker in speech communication,is the prerequisite of a sentence.Presupposition can be primarily studied from two angles,namely broad sense and narrow sense.From the broad sense,presupposition is considered as the knowledge previously known by the two sides of the communication;from the narrow sense,presupposition exists within the sentence meaning once a sentence is taken shape(Xu Shenghuan,1993: 1).Presupposition widely consists in people's daily communicative activities and literary works.The language phenomenon of pragmatic presupposition has been the hot spot in the philosophical circle and the linguistics field since it came into being.As a significant component of presupposition,pragmatic presupposition has intrigued the research interest of a large number of scholars.He Ziran(1997: 68)thought that presupposition broadly refers to the presupposition relations which are sensitive to context and related to the speaker(sometimes including the hearer)'s faith,attitude and intention.The concept of Cognitive Reference Point was first presented by Rosch(1975:532-547)when he conducted prototype experiments.Through the experiments,it was found out that the conceptual prototype of cognitive association could be used as Cognitive Reference Point to judge other members within the category.Later on,Langacker(1993: 174)extended and developed the concept of Cognitive Reference Point,and put forward Cognitive Reference Point model in 1993.Cognitive Reference Point,as a basic cognitive ability of human being,is prevalent in people's experience of life.One of the most fundamental features of Cognitive Reference Point is salience.The characteristic of salience refers that people tend to choose the eminent entity as Cognitive Reference Point to recognize other non-eminent targeting entities.Though domestic and overseas scholars have made many researches on pragmatic presupposition,they primarily concentrated on the perspectives ofphilosophy,semantics and pragmatics etc.The researches conducted from cognitive psychology are few,and the same goes for the translation field.In addition,there exist certain relations between Cognitive Reference Point and pragmatic presupposition.Under the guidance of Cognitive Reference Point,this thesis is in an attempt to discuss the representations of pragmatic presupposition in the English translation of The Corridors of Power by taking pragmatic presupposition as Cognitive Reference Point and analyzing the typical cases in the English version contributed by Paul White in a qualitative approach.The main research questions of this thesis include: 1.What are the potential feasibilities of applying Pragmatic Presupposition as Cognitive Reference Point to the analysis of the English translation of The Corridors of Power?2.What are the representations of Pragmatic Presupposition,which serves as Cognitive Reference Point,in the English translation of The Corridors of Power? 3.What are the inspirations for English translation of contemporary Chinese novels with Pragmatic Presupposition as Cognitive Reference Point? Research findings through case studies are as follows: 1.Taking Pragmatic Presupposition as Cognitive Reference Point has certain explanatory power over the analysis of English translation of The Corridors of Power.2.Under the guidance of Cognitive Reference Point,Pragmatic Presupposition is more prominent,and the representations of Pragmatic Presupposition in the English translation of The Corridors of Power become clearer.3.Pragmatic Presupposition under the guidance of Cognitive Reference Point possesses certain inspirations for translating contemporary Chinese novels into English versions.