Defeasibility of Pragmatic Presuppositions in Humor Generation

Of the two types of pragmatic presuppositions to produce humor,i.e.,generation of pragmatic presuppositions and defeasibility of pragmatic presuppositions,the latter one receives particular attention because of its unique humorous effect.Further analysis reveals that defeasibility occurs in context conflicts and in the deliberate interpretation of utterances’literal meaning by the listener.

A Study of Presupposition in Hotel's English

As a common phenomenon in language,presupposition plays an important role in linguistic communication.Study of presupposition in hotel's English reveals that on account of the felicity of information-conveying,presupposition has been em ploying by Hotels'staff intentionally or unintentionally.In hotels'service,proper use of presupposition ensures the normal con duction of hotels'service circuits,contributes to the economy and coherence of communication,facilitates understanding be tween guests and the hotels'staff.In addition,it enhances persuasion and latency of staff's speech,guarantees satisfactory settle ment of complaints.

The Case for Presupposition： On Kripke＇s Anaphoric Account

According to Kripke, traditional approaches to presupposition and anaphora do not work in some compound sentences because traditionally, they have been thought to assign presuppositions to each clause in isolation. I agree with this criticism, but also think that context is required in order to determine the presupposition included in a complex sentence. To show the context role in fixing the utterance truth-conditions in those cases, this paper introduces the Kripkean anaphoric account on presuppositions （section 2）, and then criticizes this approach because it is very restrictive （section 3）. The paper concludes that to solve those difficulties, one should appeal to a two-dimensional framework, including a new parameter that focuses on the sentence according to the concrete features of the context： the speaker＇s point of view （section 4）.

Presupposition Analysis in Advertising Language

In modem society, advertising plays a very important role in people＇s daily life. We can not imagine the world without advertisements. Advertisers try every means to design persuasive advertisements for their products by attractive patterns, photos and colors, as well as commonly shared resources of language. The use of presupposition in advertising language, which is an important topic in pragmaties, can serve the function fairly well. This paper first presents a general review of previous studies on presupposition phenomena in advertising language, then investigates the use of presuppositions in advertising language by both qualitative and quantitative analyses. By qualitative analysis, the author tries to explore the functions of each type of presuppositions in advertising texts; by quantitative analysis, 100 sentences selected from various advertisements for different products are examined.

Semantic and Pragmatic Approaches to Presupposition

Presupposition is widely studied in the field of linguistics nowadays while it was firstly put forward in philosophy.Early study ex amined it from semantic approach,which treated it as the relation between two propositions.In 1970s,it was found presupposition was also a pragmatic concept,which held that presupposition varied with context.The author holds that semantic approach can't solve all the com plex problems while it's the basic part about the issue.Only through the pragmatic approach can we study it dynamically.

Literature Review of Semantic Presupposition

Since Gottlob Frege,the German philosopher and mathematician raises the concept of presupposition in his works On Sense and Reference at the end of the 19th century,to interpret some semantic phenomenon,the discussions of presupposition have become central in both linguistic field and the field of philosophy.Presupposition is a very important linguistic concept that originates from philosophy.

The Application of Pragmatic Presupposition in Developing Critical Thinking of Writing

This study aims to explore whether developing critical thinking ability from the perspective of pragmatic presupposition can help non-English majors improve their writing achievements.This empirical study employs tests as the instruments.126 non-English majors from a key university of Shandong Province participate in the study.The results of the Ennis-Weir Critical Thinking Essay Test indicate that most subjects(95%)have inadequate or limited critical thinking ability,which leads to digression,repetitive and lengthy description,and unconvincing arguments,as well as illogical or incoherent structures in writing.After a ten-week teaching instruction from the perspective of pragmatic presupposition,students in experimental group improve their writing achievements,indicating that the instruction of critical thinking ability from the perspective of pragmatic presupposition may have certain effects on their writing performance.The study will promote the application of pragmatic presupposition to writing teaching and offer some implications for the teaching of English writing.

A Study of Presupposition Triggers in Chinese Romantic Conversations

Presupposition means an implied fact or information which is accepted by both speaker and hearer in a conversation,or at least the information that can always be inferred from the context after hearing the discourse.In the analysis of how speaker's assumptions are typically expressed,presupposition has been associated with the use of a large number of words,phrases,and structures,known as presupposition-triggers.There are many studies on trigger language at home and abroad,but there are relatively few studies on analyzing presupposition triggers from the perspective of romantic conversations.In this paper,by analyzing what presupposition triggers are used in the conversations and what functions the triggers perform,also the various ways of communication in which a boyfriend annoys his girlfiriend,we can solve the doubts of many male friends,so that people can have a deeper understanding of presupposition triggers and the application of it in romantic conversations,which may help us a lot in our daily interpersonal communication life.

An Analysis of Implication and Presupposition

This paper deals with the two concepts:implication and presupposition,their definitions,similarities and differences.Implication is of a pure logic category,which is concerned with the statement and can’t be deleted,while the presupposition is variable and has defeasibility.Implication is a part of the information of the sentence,but presupposition is background of the information.

Application of Pragmatic Presupposition in Chinese and English Advertisements

Advertisements,as an important business strategy,are now ubiquitous.As a kind of strategy of language expression,pragmatic presupposition plays an extraordinarily important role in advertising.Based on many classical cases of Chinese and English advertisements,this paper is aimed to discuss and analyze the types and features of pragmatic presupposition.The findings of this paper will provide advertisement producers with theoretical knowledge and practical strategies about how to apply pragmatic presupposition to create effective and persuasive advertisements which can really catch the eyeballs of consumers.

Linguistic Presupposition： A Multi-dimensional Perspective

Presuppositional information is encoded in linguistic expressions by means of so-called presupposition triggers or presupposition inducers. These items are linguistic means that signal that certain information is taken for granted in the linguistic or non-linguistic context. One task for presupposition theory is to identify these triggers, explain what type of information they induce, and why they do so. A second task is to explain why and under what circumstances the information thus induced is preserved as an intuitive inference of the inducing sentence. The latter problem is the projection problem for presuppositions. Theories of presupposition can be divided into the following main classes： semantic, pragmatic, and dynamic theories. Semantic theories explain presupposition as a semantic relation between sentences. Pragmatic theories take the information a speaker takes for granted in making an assertion as their starting point. Dynamic theories locate sentence meaning in its context-change potential： presuppositional information should be part of input context as a precondition for contextual update. The two major variants are the satisfaction account and the anaphoric account. The former construes presuppositions as definedness conditions on input contexts. According to the anaphoric account presuppositional expressions are anaphors that should be bound to a contextually given antecedent.

Presupposition,Cognitive Context and Translation Teaching

The study of presupposition and cognitive context has profoundly brought a new way to view translation. Based on some experiment, this paper explores a cognitive-presuppositional approach to translation teaching, and the paper concludes that this approach is to help students improve their translation competence and interest in future translation.

A Corpus-Based Analysis on the Pragmatics Presupposition in Perfume Advertisements

The advertisement has been widely utilized as a vital vehicle for information delivery,which highly requires the effects of persuasion with the proper use of pragmatic presupposition.In recent years,scholars have adopted diversified perspectives in the study of advertising discourse,but the research aimed at specific fields of advertisements is scattered,repetitive,and segmented.Hence,the corpus in this paper mainly comes from newspapers and magazines in the early years.This paper collects Chinese and English perfume advertisements from the official website,online flag-ship stores,and magazines of perfume advertising.The pragmatic presupposition in perfume advertisements is analyzed in three aspects through the definition and exemplification.Besides,the positive and negative influences of the perfume pragmatics are discussed to provide instruction for further study on the advertising language.

Knowledge, Presupposition, and Pragmatic Implicature

It is widely accepted that knowledge is factive, but two different understandings of ＂factivity＂ should be distinguished, namely, the implication version and the presupposition version. While the former only takes the truth of P as a necessary requirement for ＂S knows that P,＂ the latter considers it also necessary for ＂S does not know that P.＂ In this paper, I argue against presupposition and defend implication. More specifically, I argue against Wang and Tai＇s defense of the presupposition version as presented in a recent paper and propose a pragmatic response to the ＂persistence problem＂ of implication. In other words, my positive proposal is an account of implication plus pragmatic implicature. To conclude, I use my version to analyze Wang and Tai＇s distinction between inner skepticism and outer skepticism. My conclusion is that, after abandoning presupposition, we can identify two types of intermediate skepticism between Wang and Tai＇s inner and outer skepticism.

Rational Presupposition, Normativity and Pluralist Expression: A Cross-Cultural Perspective on the Universality of Philosophy

The question of the universality of philosophy is highlighted when seen from a cross-cultural perspective,for it reveals the tension between particularity and universality,as well as the connotations of the universality of philosophy.In terms of philosophical activities concerned with the content of Chinese life experience,the universality of philosophy,the particularity of Chinese thought,and the uniqueness of Chinese expression together constitute a persistent theoretical tension.We distinguish the universality of philosophy from universal philosophy;the former stems from the universal presupposition of rational capacity and points to the richness and pluralism of the empirical world while maintaining a dynamic balance between universality and pluralism in normative attitudes of discourse practice and conceptual activity.From the perspective of cultural subjectivity,it is necessary to avoid misleading views that equate the universality of philosophy with Western philosophy;moreover,normativity cannot be understood as specific censorship rules.The universality of philosophy requires a sense of boundaries and a normative attitude that will ensure that people from different contexts can enter into dialogue on the basis of rational ability and construct a space for dialogue and understanding.The concern for diverse objects based on the richness of experience gives philosophical concepts and arguments pluralist differences that encompass cultural differences and autonomy at the level of expression.All in all,it is only on the basis of the universality of philosophy that we can understand the normative requirements of philosophical activities and the pluralism of cross-cultural philosophical reflection.

A Critique of the Philosophical Presuppositions of Cognitive Psychology

In the historical interaction of science and philosophy,empirical science has used cumulative research to shed new light on how the science of philosophy understands fundamental scientific issues.As an effort of self-renewal,the initial impetus for the birth of cognitive science was dialogue among disciplines,with a view to making it possible to unlock the mysteries of cognition.In other words,cognitive science was to pave the way for fundamentally updating the philosophical premises of the science of mind or even making possible a new scientific worldview.As a branch of cognitive science,psychology was to have contributed to the renovation of the ontological,methodological and scientific worldview of cognitive science through its unique interpretation of human nature.However,in the course of the development of cognitive science and psychology,psychology has failed to employ its disciplinary endeavors to renew the ontology,methodology and values of the philosophical foundations of cognitive science,and has also failed to contribute to the promotion of cognitive science.On the contrary,cognitive science’s mechanistic worldview and positivist methodology are the sole determinants of the background of cognitive science that shapes psychology’s model of development—that is,cognitive psychology(if one sees cognitive psychology as a concrete manifestation of the interaction of cognitive science and psychology).This study examines cognitive psychology’s ontological,methodological and value presuppositions and scientific worldview and reflects on the blind and passive nature of the discipline’s development.Moreover,from a history of science perspective,it considers how the development of this discipline can contribute to the renewal of scientific concepts in the philosophy of science through the interaction of the mature natural sciences and philosophy and thence provide possibilities for handling the relationship between psychology and philosophy in psychology’s future development.

Fighting the COVID-19 pandemic with words:an investigation of pragmatic presuppositions in Chinese anti-pandemic slogans

Slogans play an important role in Chinese society.Numerous slogans have been created and used in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.As an eyecatching linguistic phenomenon,anti-pandemic slogans have sparked heated debates not only among the general public,but also in the academic sector.This study is focused on the pragmatic presuppositions in Chinese anti-pandemic slogans.By adopting a mixed approach(quantitative and qualitative),it finds that six types of pragmaticpresuppositions are used inChinese anti-pandemic slogans.Among them,the behavioral presuppositionsrank first in frequency of use,factive presuppositions second,stative presuppositions third,belief presuppositions fourth,cultural presuppositions fifth and emotional presuppositions sixth.The pragmatic presuppositions of these slogans can serve four major functions,which are persuading people to act properly,spreading scientific knowledge,warning people against wrongdoings and bolstering people’s confidence.However,there are sporadic occurrences of misusing pragmatic presuppositions in the so-called“hardcore”slogans.This study concludes that knowledge of pragmatic presuppositions is essential to a correct understanding and a proper creation of Chinese anti-pandemic slogans.

Pragmatics and Its Significant Implications on EFL Teaching

Based on pragmatics theories, this article will discuss its application and put forward the implications of pragmatics on EFL teaching.

The Existential Presuppositon of Only

Only has existential presuppositional meaning in sentences with focus,which are associated with it.The suspension facts can provide some witness to test this view.Finally it is concluded that Only with its restriction,the nonfocus part can carry out its existential presupposition.

Chinese Negation Marker Bu and Its Association with Focus

TheChinesenegationmarkerbu'not'isanalyzedasaclitic-likeelementintheliterature(Huang,1988;Ernst,1995,etc.)inordertoexplainwhyitcannotco-occurwith(i)perfectivemarker-leor(ii)mannerphrases(cf.sentences(1)and(2)).(1)*Wobu-chi-lemuguaInot-eatPerfpapaya(Hu...