（英语语言文学专业论文）语用预设及其对语篇连贯的价值.pdf

摘要 经过长达约二十年的争论学术界现已普遍接受预设是一种语用关系但对 于什么是语用预设语用预设究竟是语言性的还是非语言性的仍存在不同的理 解和定义另外以往的预设研究是在句子的层面上进行的忽略了预设在语篇 层面上的研究可能 本文试图从语篇的视角对语用预设提出一种新的理解 并由此探讨预设在超 句结构中对语篇的连贯所起的作用作者认为 作为一种语用现象预设是发 话者表达已知信息和共有信息的一种修辞手段 它包括规约性预设和非规约性预 设规约性预设由于与语言表层结构关系紧密因而在语篇的信息流中直接制 约着信息展开的方式并以此制约语篇的连贯非规约性预设由于涉及到双方对 会话情景 民族文化及一般常识的认知状态是听者判断话语关联和表达清晰的 基础因此对判断语篇是否连贯具有很大价值作者认为在语篇的层面上对预 设进行研究不但可以揭示预设在超句结构中的运作机制, 而且可以阐释语篇连 贯的内部机制 关键词语用预设语篇连贯, 规约性预设非规约性预设 abstract after about two decades of debate over the semantic-or-pragmatic status of presupposition, the view generally taken now is that presupposition is a pragmatic notion. however, even if we accept that presupposition is a part of pragmatics, there remains a further discussion as to what is meant by pragmatic presupposition and whether or not it can be described purely in linguistic terms or whether it involves non-linguistic knowledge as well. moreover, previous research on presupposition has been conventionally confined to the sentential level of language with the discourse aspects of presupposition being greatly downplayed. this paper is an attempt to propose a new understanding of pragmatic presupposition from the discourse perspective, by which we can investigate its coherence value at the supra-sentential level of language. it is suggested that, as a pragmatic phenomenon, presupposition can be viewed as a way of expressing given information and mutual knowledge. two types of presupposition are distinguished: conventional and non-conventional. conventional presupposition, being closely tied to surface aspects of language, dictates the flow of information in a discourse and consequently, exerts constraint on discourse coherence. non-conventional presupposition, involving discourse participants knowledge about the situational context, the socio-cultural aspects and the world in general, has a great bearing on ones perception of discourse coherence and degrees of discourse coherence, depending on whether a stretch of discourse is perceived as relevant and expression clear. it is demonstrated that the examination of presupposition in ongoing discourse can provide insights into the mechanism of presupposition at discourse level and at the same time, account for the internal mechanism of discourse coherence. key words: pragmatic presupposition; discourse coherence; conventional presupposition; non-conventional presupposition p r a g m a t i c p r e s u p p o s i t i o n a n d i t s v a l u e i n d i s c o u r s e c o h e r e n c e 1 1. introduction ever since the notion of presupposition was initiated by frege, the study of presupposition has been viewed as a highly technical subject involving subtle logical distinctions. experts in these matters have been dreadfully hinged on the question of whether the phenomenon of presupposition is amenable to a purely logico-semantic analysis arising out of stable word-internal meaning and grammatical relationships or whether it can only be adequately dealt with by a pragmatic account. proponents of the semantic approach treats presupposition as constant, context-independent meanings, the truth of which is a necessary condition for a sentence to have a truth value. since it can be easily demonstrated that presupposition by this definition can evaporate in a certain context, and that the truth value of a sentence will not perish even if its presupposition is not correct, the semantic approach has been largely abandoned and the view generally taken now is a pragmatic one. the pragmatic approach, by contrast, defines presupposition as the speakers background assumption when uttering a sentence, a concept which is irrelevant to the truth value of a sentence, and which requires us to resort to notions of variability of use in context. after having been the focus of lively discussions on the part of linguists and philosophers of language during the 1970s, presupposition “seemed to have gone out of fashion by the 1990s”(caffi, 1994: 3321). this decline might be imputed to the lack of a unanimously accepted pragmatic theory which can account for a wide range of heterogeneous phenomena that are considered as presuppositions. as hickey puts, echoing levinson, “virtually everything written about presupposition is challenged or contradicted by some authority on the subject”(fawcett, 2001: 114). then the questions are: is it possible to reach an encompassing pragmatic account of presupposition that covers such a wide scope of heterogeneous phenomena? is it still necessary to keep this notion working despite the fact that there is no clear-cut theoretical account available at present for the subtle distinctions between different p r a g m a t i c p r e s u p p o s i t i o n a n d i t s v a l u e i n d i s c o u r s e c o h e r e n c e 2 phenomena? what on earth is the value of presupposition as a pragmatic matter? in this paper, i will draw upon the insights generated by decades of research on semantic and pragmatic presuppositions from both home and abroad; i will follow the pragmatic pursuit and establish a general framework for the study of presupposition in which a range of heterogeneous phenomena will be entertained. more specifically, i will draw a demarcation line between roughly two types of presupposition: conventional and non-conventional, which do not differ in nature but in their reliance on linguistic manifestations for being identified. armed with a better understanding of presupposition, it is possible for us to explore what value presupposition bears on discourse. surprisingly, or perhaps not surprisingly, previous research on presupposition has been conventionally confined to the sentential level of language (zhu and miao, 2000). since the pragmatic presupposition can be considered as a way of expressing information, some linguists have already noted the significance of putting presupposition at the supra-sentential level of language. for instance, ducrot (1972) points out that the basic function of presuppositions is to “establish a frame for further discourse”(caffi, 1994: 3321); van dijk (1981: 51) argues that “the notion of presupposition was introduced in philosophy, logic and linguistics in order to account for certain properties of texts and contexts which could not be solved in terms of traditional sentence grammars alone.” despite a scatter of these remarks in the current literature, very few writers, to my knowledge at least, have focused on studying what influence presupposition genuinely exerts on the development of a discourse. zhu and miao (2000) braved the first step in examining the discourse functions of pragmatic presupposition, but their research was only concerned with the conventional type and did not mention the non-conventional one at all. although non-conventional presuppositions, as background assumptions without linguistic manifestations, are difficult to theorize, their functions at the discourse level can not afford to be neglected. following their efforts, i will reflect on what kind of role these two types of presuppositions can play to the effect of discourse coherence. i consider my current study as a direct response to caffis call for “moving the study of presupposition from an analysis of predicates p r a g m a t i c p r e s u p p o s i t i o n a n d i t s v a l u e i n d i s c o u r s e c o h e r e n c e 3 within single sentences to the analysis of discourse structures in which the presupposition is one of the effects” (1994: 3326). the structure of this paper is as follows. it begins with a review of the study of presupposition and a variety of definitions, theories and explanations that have been put forward along with its development. then two types of presupposition conventional and non-conventional presuppositions are distinguished and discussed in detail from either a linguistic or a non-linguistic point of view. following that, presupposition is studied from a discourse perspective. the discourse properties of presupposition are explored and demonstrated before we arrive at a discourse-related pragmatic account of presupposition. finally, the coherence value of these two types of presupposition is examined respectively within different but not incompatible theories of discourse coherence that are mapped out in light of grices cooperative principle. p r a g m a t i c p r e s u p p o s i t i o n a n d i t s v a l u e i n d i s c o u r s e c o h e r e n c e 4 2. a survey of the study of presupposition we said in the introduction that the study of presupposition has been to some extent concerned with categorization, with the question of whether presupposition is a semantic notion or a pragmatic one. however like many other important notions in linguistics, as indeed in almost any branch of learning, presupposition, either semantic or pragmatic, has its roots in philosophy. therefore, any discussion of it cannot afford to neglect its philosophical origin. 2. 1 the philosophical origin the first philosopher who brought the concept of presupposition to the notice of the scholarly world is gottlob frege, the architect of modern logic, who published an article “on sense and reference” in 1892. in this article frege introduces presupposition to account for problems that arise in connection with the use of non-denoting terms. the relevant passage runs as follows: if anything is asserted there is always an obvious presupposition that the simple or compound proper names used have reference. if one therefore asserts kepler died in misery, there is a presupposition that the name kepler designates something; but it does not follow that the sense of the sentence kepler died in misery contains the thought that the name kepler designates something. if this were the case the negation would have to run not kepler did not die in misery but kepler did not die in misery, or the name kepler has no reference (frege 1892 in geach and black, 1980: 69) thus according to frege, from sentence 2.1, we can infer sentence 2.2. 2.1. kepler died in misery. 2.2 there was a man called kepler. this kind of inference is not part of the logical meaning of the sentence. sentence 2.1 does not tell us directly that 2.2 is the case. but 2.2 is the precondition for the use of p r a g m a t i c p r e s u p p o s i t i o n a n d i t s v a l u e i n d i s c o u r s e c o h e r e n c e 5 2.1. without the existence of kepler, one cannot talk about his dying in misery or anything at all. one thing worth mentioning is that frege is the first to note that the same presupposition remains unchanged in the corresponding negative sentence. thus sentence 2.3 also presupposes 2.2. 2.3. kepler did not die in misery. the main point of freges analysis is that the condition that the name kepler has a referent is not part of the assertions of sentence 2.1 and 2.3. rather, it is the presupposition for the assertion in question. the british philosopher bertrand russell, however, disagrees with freges distinction between what is presupposed and what is asserted. in his article “on denoting” of 1905, he proposes to analyze such proposition as 2.1 in a different way. according to him, the (a) propositions below are analyzed as the ones in (b). 2.4. a. the present king of france is bald. b. there is an x such that x is now king of france and x is bald. 2.5. a. kepler died in misery. b. there was an x such that x was called kepler and that x died in misery. in this way, the denoting phrases are broken up, analyzed away, or eliminated. they are no longer there in the resultant propositions. the original proposition is now seen as a conjunction of the new propositions. for example, 2.4a is analyzed as a conjunction of the three propositions in 2.6: 2.6. a. there is a king of france. b. there is no one else who is king of france. c. the king of france is bald. russell holds the view that anyone saying 2.4a in 1905, or today, would be asserting something that is false, given the fact that there was no king of france then, as there is not today. following his way of analyzing, sentence 2.7a is ambiguous, for it can mean either 2.7b or 2.7c. in the first sense, 2.7a is true, and in the second, it is false. 2.7. a. the present king of france is not bald. b. it is false that there is an entity which is now king of france and is bald. p r a g m a t i c p r e s u p p o s i t i o n a n d i t s v a l u e i n d i s c o u r s e c o h e r e n c e 6 c. there is an entity which is now king of france and is not bald. this line of argument did not meet any criticism until about half a century later when peter strawson wrote “on referring” in 1950. strawson fiercely attacks russells theory and revives the concept of presupposition. when analyzing “the king of france is bald,” russell says part of its meaning is that there is a king of france. strawson, however, dismisses this view as “unquestionably wrong” (garfield and kiteley, 1991: 111). he makes a distinction between (a) sentences that contain an expression that can be used to refer to certain objects or individuals, and (b) purely existential sentences. on his view, when a sentence contains a definite description in subject position, the description is used to refer to a certain person or object; such a sentence falls in the first and not the second category; the corresponding existential sentences are presupposed and not asserted. strawson not only objects to russells obscuration of the distinction between assertion and presupposition, but also rises against the latters view on the truth value of a statement like 2.8. 2.8. the king of france is wise. he argues that in response to such a statement, nobody would say “thats untrue.” if pressed for an opinion of its truth value, the listener would possibly say that she1 does not think it is true, or it is false. the question of whether the statement is true or false simply does not arise, because there is no such person as the king of france. the statement has no truth value. the truth of the presuppositions of a sentence, therefore, is a condition for the possibility of making an assertion by means of that sentence. if some presupposition of a sentence is not true, that sentence cannot be used to make a statement, and cannot have a truth value. in the book introduction to logical theory published in 1952, strawson presents the following definition of presupposition: 2.9. a statement s presupposes a statement s if and only if the truth of s is a necessary condition for the truth or falsity of s. (van der sandt, 1988: 7) 1 for the convenience of expressing, “he” is used to refer to the speaker and “she” to the listener throughout the paper. p r a g m a t i c p r e s u p p o s i t i o n a n d i t s v a l u e i n d i s c o u r s e c o h e r e n c e 7 we may notice that strawson does not make definite descriptions in subject position the sole possible source in defining presupposition. on his definition any statement that must be true for another statement to have a truth value is a presupposition of that statement (van der sandt, 1988: 8). this has led to the further study of a variety of linguistic devices that give rise to presuppositions. what is more important about this definition is that it has specified the status of presupposition as truth-conditional for its host sentence. this is exactly the base on which the semantic approach of presupposition is later on established. on the other hand, though strawson makes no use of pragmatic notions in defining presupposition, yet on the assumption that a speaker must make in principle verifiable statements, the definition predicts that an attempted assertion is infelicitous or inappropriate unless its presuppositions are satisfied, or on the assumption that a speaker must believe what he says (searles sincerity condition for assertion and grices maxim of quality), the definition predicts that it is incorrect for a speaker to utter a sentence unless he believes its presuppositions to be true. thus, strawsons view also opens the way for presupposition to come into pragmatics. in one word, strawsons theory acts as the thin end of a wedge, leading to a craze for the study of presupposition in the 1970s in company with flourishing literature from both a semantic and a pragmatic perspective. 2.2 semantic conceptions of presupposition 2.2.1 truth conditional definitions of presupposition proponents of the semantic account of presupposition are called “neo-strawsonians” in that they follow strawsons suit in considering presupposition in terms of truth-value assignment. their position differs from strawsons in that they think sentences whose presuppositions are not satisfied do not fall outside of the scope of the logic. as we mentioned in the last section, strawsons view of the statement “the king of france is wise” is that it has no truth value. according to the neo-strawsonians, however, it does have a truth value, “the somewhat peculiar truth value of neither-true-nor-false, distinct from the two values, true and false, of the p r a g m a t i c p r e s u p p o s i t i o n a n d i t s v a l u e i n d i s c o u r s e c o h e r e n c e 8 standard propositional calculus” (lyons, 1977: 596). moreover, strawson holds the view that statements, rather than sentences, are the bearers of presuppositions because he thinks it is only statements which are true or false, not sentences2. while this distinction is maintained by strawson, this is not the case wi