语用学总结

Summary of chapter 4

Presupposition is another kind of pragmatic inference which based more closely on the actual linguistic structure of sentences. There are two things we should pay attention to. The first is that there is more literature on presupposition and the second concerns the distinction between the ordinary usage of the word "presuppotion" and its technical usage within linguistics.

About the nature of reference and referring expression, lots of scholars put forward their opinion. In elliptical discussion Frege raised maky issues that were later to become central to discussion of presupposition. Russell argued that Frege's view led to anomalies, and he proposed instead his well-know theory of descriptions. Then Strawson called the relation presupposition, and he held that it was a special species of pragmatic inference, distinct from logical implication or entailment, a species which derives from conventions about the use of referring expressions. Up till this point linguists had been operating with one crucial semantic relation in particular, namely entailment or logical consequence. In 1971, Keenan held his view from an independent and distinct class of pragmatic inference which he called pragmatic presuppositions, which are best described as a relation between a speaker and the appropriateness of a sentence in a context.

Frege's and Strawson's claim that presuppositions are preserved in negative sentences or statements. And, presupposition seem to be tied to particular words or aspects of surface structure in general. This presupposition-generating linguistic items is called presupposition-trigger. We shall use this set of core phenomena to investigate some further basic properties that presupposition exhibit.

If we examine the core phenomena listed above we soon find that actually presupposition do exhibit a further set of distinguishing characteristics. They have defeasibility which turns out to be one of the crucial properties of presuppositional behavior and they are apparently tied to particular aspects of surface structure. In addition, there is another problematic property known as the projection problem, namely, the behavior of presuppositions in complex sentence. One of the peculiar things about presuppositions is that they are liable to evaporate in certain contexts

either immediate linguistic context or the less immediate discourse context, or in circumstances where contrary assumptions are made. Another kind of contextual defeasibility arises in certain kinds of discourse contexts. A slight different kind of discourse context can also lead to the evaporation of presuppositions. The meaning of sentences are compositional problem is known as the projection problem for presuppositions. There are two sides to the projection problem. On the one hand, presuppositions survive in linguistic contexts where entailments cannot. On the other hand, presuppositions disappear in other contexts where one might expect them to survive.

There are kinds of explanation of presupposition. We shall proceed to evaluate the three main kinds of pragmatic theory that have been proposed.1) sematic presupposition, there are two main classes of semantic theories avaible to linguists, one is truth conditional class of theories while the other is the class that assumes that all semantic relations are definable in terms of translations of sentences into atomic concepts or semantic features. To sum up, preposition are not invariant and they are not stable and they do not belong in any orderly semantics.2) pragmatic theories of presupposition. There are various theories of pragmatic presupposition and these definitions utilized two basic concepts in particular: appropriateness and mutual knowledge. The two theories we are about to review both assume that presuppositions are part of the conventional meaning of expression, even through they are not semantic inferences. The first conventional theory is Montague grammar in which clauses are built up from their constituents from the bottom up in transformational generative grammar. In contrast to the prior theory, in Gazdar's theory presuppositions are actually canceled. His theory also handles the cases of overt presupposition denial very straightforwardly. These two theories deal with the projection problem in anything like an adequate way. In order to show that alternative theories could be viable, it is useful to apply the re-allocation programme which is independent of any particular theory of presupposition and a sensible preliminary to any such theory.

We conclude that presupposition remains still only partially understood, and an important ground for the study of how semantics and pragmatics interact.