A Comparative Study Of Presupposition Triggers In Chinese Government Work Report And U.S.State Of Union Address

The concept of presupposition was first proposed by the German logician Frege,and it first belonged to the study of philosophy and logic.Only in the 1960 s did presupposition attract attention from the linguistic field and successfully became a research focus of linguists.In further research on presuppositions,some scholars have found that presuppositions can be triggered by certain specific words,sentence patterns,or phonetic forms.These language forms that can trigger presuppositions are presupposition triggers.The research on presupposition triggers mainly focused on news,advertisements,speeches,etc.There are also some studies that touch on the application of presupposition triggers in political discourse,but seldom of them analyzes the presupposition triggers in the political discourse of two countries from the perspective of contrast.The study of political discourses mainly starts from the perspective of critical discourse analysis,conceptual metaphor,and linguistic feature analysis.Therefore,this article selects the representative Chinese Government Work Report and the U.S.State of Union Address,and discusses the similarities,differences as well as functions of their presupposition triggers.This paper attempts to explore the similarities and differences of political discourse and the differences in power,ideology and values between the two countries through the comparative analysis of presupposition triggers in their annual work reports.This paper adopts the classification of 13 presupposition triggers in Levinson’s Pragmatics as the theoretical framework and employs qualitative and quantitative methods to explore the presupposition triggers in the Government Work Report and the State of Union address.The dissertation has selected three original manuscripts of the State of Union address and three translated Government Work Reports from authoritative sources,and compiled two closed corpora respectively,the number and frequency of presupposition triggers in these files are calculated by the software of Antconc.Through the analysis,the paper finds that there are similarities and differencesbetween the use of presupposition trigger in the State of the Union address and the Chinese Government Work Report,and the differences are more than the similarities.First,the presupposition triggers are fully applied in the annual work reports of both countries,and lexical presupposition triggers are used more than syntactical presupposition triggers in both texts.There are no verbs of judging and implicit clefts with stressed constituents in the reports of both countries;then,the frequency of most of the presupposition triggers in the reports of the two countries is quite different,and the total frequency is also different.Finally,the functions of presupposition in such political discourse is summarized as the following four: to avoid redundancy,to indicate emphasis,to elicit information and to enhance consistency.