A Contrastive Study Of Presupposition Triggers In Chinese And American News Reports On COVID-19

As a communicative strategy,presupposition is often used in news reports.As the language forms to express presupposition,presupposition triggers play an important role in presupposition research.Previous researches on presupposition triggers are mainly conducted in terms with data collected from advertisements,speeches and political discourses and few studies are concerned with contents of news reports.Since the outbreak of COVID-19,the relevant news reported abounded at home and abroad.There are some researches focusing on COVID-19,which is mainly carried on from the perspectives of medicine,economics and psychology.The linguistic researches concerned with COVID-19 are conducted from the corpus-based discourse analysis of news reports and their comments and researches attempt to investigate the influence of the epidemic on language use.Besides,some scholars conduct a pragmatic analysis of how to use correct expressions during the epidemic.No researches about COVID-19 can be figured out by the contrastive analysis of presupposition triggers in two different news reports.This thesis has collected 10 news reports on COVID-19 in China Daily and 10 in The New York Times and established two close corpora respectively.After the detailed analysis,the frequency,similarities,differences and functions of the presupposition triggers are proposed.The current research adopts the presupposition triggers defined by Levinson and Z.X.He’s classification as the theoretical framework.With both qualitative and quantitative methods,this contrastive study focuses on the similarities and differences of the presupposition triggers used in the reports on COVID-19 in China Daily and The New York Times.Also,the functions presupposition triggers perform in the news reports will also be discussed.The causes affecting the similarities and differences on the use of presupposition triggers in two types of news reports will also be explored.Results demonstrate that both types of news reports on COVID-19 use presupposition triggers frequently and both the similarities and differences between the uses of presupposition triggers are found.All of the six kinds of presupposition triggers at lexical level are applied in the two types of reports while more types of presupposition triggers at syntactical level are employed in The New York Times.Besides,as for the functions of presupposition triggers in news reports on COVID-19,the comparative analysis reveals that presupposition triggers in China Daily mainly perform the function of passing information to readers.In The New York Times,however,functions of setting background and molding readers’ ideologies are also served by presupposition triggers apart from imparting information to readers.What’s more,the English pro-temporality and hypotactic feature contribute to the similarity of wide use of presupposition triggers at syntactical level in two types of news reports,while the different use of some particular types of presupposition triggers is generated by the different cultural background in China and America.