Pragmatic Presuppositions In American Presidential Debates

The American presidential debate has a long-standing tradition in the United States.It plays an important role in the presidential election due to its social and political specialties.As a result,the candidates will make full use of their eloquence and strict logic to realize various purposes,such as attacking the opponents,defending themselves and gaining support from voters.The advocates' profound debate words and excellent debate skills have been a focus of many linguistic researchers.Presupposition has also attracted attention of scholars at home and abroad due to its special characteristics.It is important in highlighting the focus of language and increasing the persuasion of language.Therefore,this thesis tries to combine these two elements,studying pragmatic presuppositions in American presidential debates in accordance with the framework of Zhi Yongbi(2010)which carries out critical discourse analysis of political discourse from the perspective of pragmatic presuppositions,expecting to seek what kinds of presuppositions are used in the debates and how these debates help candidates realize their political and communicative goals.The present study classifies pragmatic presuppositions into explicitly triggered pragmatic presuppositions and implicitly evaluative pragmatic presuppositions.The former refer to what are introduced by nominalization and presupposition triggers put forward by Levinson(1983),while the later are elicited by evaluative language sources apart from explicit triggers.Data of the thesis are selected from 2016 American presidential debates,aiming to make a detailed analysis of the pragmatic presuppositions used by the two candidates � Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.It is found that both two candidates have employed explicit presupposition triggers at lexical and syntactic levels to induce presuppositions in order to fulfill purposes such as publicizing their policies,attacking their rivals,and transferring the focus.The research also finds that,though almost all types of presupposition triggers appear in the debate,be it at lexical level or at syntactic level,Trump employs more presupposition triggers than Clinton does.Besides,when using a presupposition of the same kind,the purposes these two candidates want to achieve are not quite the same.With regard to implicitly evaluative presuppositions,the two candidates both use evaluative words at lexical level and structures with no definite subjects and negative structures at syntactic level to transmit implicit evaluations;in the metaphorical dimension,the two candidates mainly adopt war metaphor and journey metaphor to deliver certain information.