| In political news discourse,to unveil implied meanings and hidden ideologies,reporters are likely to employ different linguistic devices,and pragmatic presupposition is one of them.To be specific,the pragmatic presupposition is one of the commonest ways of conveying attitudes,opinions,and intentions.When it comes to the analysis of news discourse,researchers show a preference for adopting Critical Discourse Analysis as the analytic framework,such as Fairclough’s three-tiered model,van Dijk’s Social Cognitive Approach,and Leeuwen’s Social Actors Approach.Recent studies touch upon investigating the usage and functions of pragmatic presupposition in news headlines under the instruction of Critical Discourse Analysis.This study,based on 20 pieces of Chinese news discourse and 20 pieces of western news discourse concerning China’s 70-year National Day celebrations,aims to reveal differences in ideologies of Chinese and western news discourse by interpreting commonalities and variations in the usage of pragmatic presupposition.Based on the integration of Levinson’s(1983),Yule’s(2000),He’s(2001)classification as well as Fairclough’s(1995)three-tiered model,the thesis proposes a refined analytic framework.To be specific,the refined framework consists of three stages.To begin with,describing frequencies and distribution of pragmatic presupposition identified in Chinese and western news discourse(factive presupposition,behavioral presupposition,evaluative presupposition,expressive presupposition,implicative presupposition,restrictive presupposition,and structural presupposition).In addition,similarities and differences in pragmatic presupposition are interpreted respectively.Finally,economic and political reasons for the similarities and differences are explained.Economically,both Chinese and western news media witness the improvement of Chinese people’s living standards and China’s economic status.However,the means of expressing their approval are quite different.The former is likely to directly express its pride and appreciation,while the latter tends to highlight potential crises and threats.Politically,Chinese news media intends to establish a positive and peaceful image in front of other countries by means of avoiding excessively emotional expressions.In contrast,western news reporters are more likely to convey subjective and personal attitudes than Chinese reporters do to some extent.The thesis discovers that there are some similarities in the distribution of pragmatic presupposition in Chinese and western news discourse.Firstly,there is no great significance in the usage of neutral pragmatic presuppositions.Secondly,the distribution of evaluative presupposition and expressive presupposition from the positive perspective is similar in Chinese and western news discourse.Thirdly,the disparity of negative factive presupposition and negative evaluative presupposition is inconspicuous.Results also reveal significant differences in the frequency and distribution of positive and negative pragmatic presupposition.On the one hand,Chinese news discourse shows the tendency of employing positive pragmatic presupposition significantly more than western news discourse does.On the other hand,western news reporters are likely to employ more negative pragmatic presuppositions than Chinese news reporters do.The study also provides implications for further research on pragmatic presupposition and political news discourse.For one thing,the refined analytic framework proposed in this thesis could further enrich the dimensions of pragmatic presupposition to some degree.For another,the findings could raise readers’ ability to identify and distinguish real attitudes and intentions behind news discourse critically and objectively. |
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