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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.