社会主义的本质要求是?【语用前提的本质特征】

　　摘 要:本文运用关联理论作为理论依据探讨语用前提的本质特征。文章认为,语用前提的本质特征是它的共知性、合适性、主观性、动态性和可撤消性。 　　关键词:前提;关联理论;认知语境;语境效果
　　OntheDefiningPropertiesofPragmaticPresupposition
　　LiuZhi-hui
　　(Hunan Finance and Economics Institute, Changsha Hunan 410205)
　　Abstract:Taking the Relevance Theory (RT) as its rationale, this paper intends to make a tentative investigation on the properties of presupposition. It regards that the defining features of pragmatic presupposition, namely, mutuality, felicity, subjectivity, dynamicity and defeasibility.
　　Key Words:presupposition, property, Relevance Theory
　　
　　1. Introduction
　　 Studies of presupposition can be traced back to more than one century ago. During those days, philosophers and linguists investigated this subject with numerous outputs.Different scholars put forward their viewpoints based on their own theories and understanding, making the studies of this topic a deeper and more thorough one. Among the scholars, Frege(1892), Stalnaker(1973), Levinson(1983), Yule(1999), Grundy(2000)are the major representatives. No wonder Levinson once said: “there is more literature on presupposition than on almost any other topic in pragmatics (excepting perhaps speech acts), and while much of this is of a technical and complex kind, a great deal is also obsolete and sterile.” (Levinson, 1983:167)
　　Following the previous study, this paper intends to make a tentative investigation on the properties of presupposition by taking the Relevance Theory (RT) as its rationale, attempting to present the thorough exploration of them.
　　2. The Concept of Presupposition
　　It is commonly accepted in linguistic field that presupposition can be divided into semantic presupposition and pragmatic presupposition. In this thesis, we hold that presupposition is a concept of pragmatic nature. Presupposition is a special kind of pragmatic reference which cannot be only thought of as semantic (i.e. as pertaining to the meanings of words, phrases and sentences) because it is based squarely on certain contextual assumption concerning the relevance of participants in a conversation, rather than being built into the linguistic structure of the sentence that gives rise to it. It does not seem at least to be based more closely on the actual linguistic structure of a sentence. In many discussions of the concept, presupposition is treated as a relationship between two propositions. If we say that Sentence[1a.] contains the proposition p and Sentence[1b.] contains the proposition q, then, using the symbol >> to mean presupposes, we can represent the relationship between them in [1c.].
　　[1] a. John’s car is luxurious(p)
　　 b. John has a car (q)
　　 c. p >> q
　　The presupposition q is not simply aroused by the noun phrase John’s car; instead,it is the assumption given by the speaker that John has a car. This example can certainly help to justify our view that in the study of presupposition, emphasis should be laid in the pragmatic perspective rather than in the linguistic perspective.
　　3. Properties of Presupposition
　　As is discussed in the previous part, the main features of pragmatic presupposition lie in the cognitive context. Pragmatic presupposition is an assumption that has some relationships with a certain context. Only in this way, can we get the key characteristics of pragmatic presupposition. In the following part of this chapter, we will verify the defining features of pragmatic presupposition, namely, mutuality, felicity, subjectivity, dynamicity and defeasibility, attempting to propose a comparatively reasonable definition of this pragmatic concept.
　　3.1 Mutuality of Pragmatic Presupposition
　　The mutuality of pragmatic presupposition means that the precondition of an utterance should be known both to the speaker and to the hearer.Presuppositions are the prerequisites assumed by the speaker, which guarantees the hearer’s understanding of the ontological meaning. If the hearer can understand an utterance correctly, it is demonstrated that the preconditions assumed by the speaker have become the common knowledge of the participants in a linguistic communication.
　　Presuppositions constituted by the common knowledge and situational context cannot be understood in the structure of an utterance itself. They must be combined with a definite context. Only when these presuppositions become known to both the participants, can they be called pragmatic presupposition. Otherwise, they are only the speaker’s convert ideas, and are meaningless to the hearer. Example [2] can help to demonstrate explicitly the feature of mutuality held by presupposition.
　　[2] A: I’m afraid my car broke down.
　　 B: Please take mine.
　　In this adjacency pair, Statement A has the presupposition that speaker A has a car.This kind of information can be inferred from the logical-semantic relationship. Thus, it is a semantic presupposition. The situational presuppositions may be that the speaker needs another car while the general knowledge may be that without a car, the speaker cannot do something. By sharing these pragmatic presuppositions and getting the illocutionary force, the second speaker gives an offer that is relevant to the context.
　　3.2 Felicity of Pragmatic Presupposition
　　Felicity, another defining feature of pragmatic presupposition, originally refers to the conditions that a performative verb must meet if it is to be appropriate or successful.For example, the performative I pronounce you man and wife will be effective in marrying people only under the conditions that the person uttering it is qualified to solemnize marriages, that it forms part of a marriage ceremony, that the couple have agreed to marry, and so on (Matthews, 2000:128). It was introduced by Austin on the model of truth conditions and elaborated by J.R. Searle for speech acts generally. The felicity conditions of pragmatic presupposition include two sides, one is contextual felicity, and the other is social felicity.
　　 The pragmatic presuppositions of an utterance constitute the indispensable connection between the spoken words and the world of their user’s,which is required for forming the appropriate pragmatic act. Participants in communication should follow the cultural schema and try to make the social felicity known to each other to guarantee a smooth and relevant communication.
　　3.3 Dynamicity of Pragmatic Presupposition
　　Dynamicity is originally a grammatical category which is used to refer to verb denoting an action, a process,etc., as opposed to a state. It can also be used to refer to aspects. For instance, a verb meaning sit might, in a dynamic form, be used for the action of sitting down. Here, we shall take it as a pragmatic category. He Zhaoxiong(1997) points out that context is not a static and stagnating concept but a dynamic and developing one. Communication itself is a dynamic process in which context changes with it. Some communicative components change greatly, especially the new information, which escalates and becomes mutual to each other in a communication and acts as the base for further communication. After all, communication, in its narrow sense, is the exchange of information. Pragmatic presupposition, the starting point in conversation, also varies along the process of communication until it becomes shared by both the participants.
　　The process of communication, as a matter of fact, is a process of constituting a context. Pragmatic presupposition, as one of the components in context, is also a dynamic one which changes from the unfamiliar to the familiar. If the presupposition in a statement is regarded as the familiar information, the assertion in a statement is, then, the unfamiliar, unknown information to be transferred in a conversation. Thus, the presupposition and assertion in a sentence correspond to the subject and predicate of this statement respectively.
　　The dynamic context is an environment that is steadily in development,prompted by the continuous interaction of the participants in communication. As a component of context, pragmatic presupposition holds the dynamic characteristic to assure the progression of communication.
　　3.4 Subjectivity of Pragmatic Presupposition
　　Subjectivity, in ordinary sense, refers to the property of language by which utterances reflect the standpoint of the speaker’s.In human communication, a speaker always takes his/her position as the center of a conversation, or plays the leading role in conversation.
　　As for the presupposition in communication, it is subjective to the speaker;that is to say, the speaker has the priority in choosing the representative form in communication. The pragmatic presupposition is what the speaker assumes to be certain. In this sense, in giving an utterance, the speaker makes a judgment about the hearer’s background knowledge. The following is a dialogue between two inhabitants in Changsha last summer, when there was a serious electricity shortage in the city.
　　[3] A: It is raining heavily now.
　　 B: We need not worry about the electricity any more!
　　Speaker B’s utterance seems to be irrelevant to A’ utterance. But B assumes at least that: 1) A knows the fact that Changsha is short of electrical power; 2) A Knows that the electricity shortage in Changsha results from the long dry weather; 3) A knows that rain will provide a lot of water and cause the river to rise; 4) A knows that plenty of water in the river will help to generate plenty of electricity. If Speaker A gets these knowledge pre-stored in his/her mind, he/she can certainly understand the informative meaning and communicative meaning by making some inferences and can give relevant response to B.
　　3.5 Defeasibility of Presupposition
　　Presupposition, as well as implicature, can be cancelled or suspended in some certain contexts. This is the common characteristic of pragmatic inferences. The contextual reason for the cancellation of presupposition mainly lies in two aspects: linguistic factors and non-linguistic factors. The discourse factors belong to linguistic factors; that is to say, if an utterance is put into a certain context, some of its original presuppositions are suspended. In fact, it is because these presuppositions are negated in the given context. The non-linguistic factor which leads to the cancellation of presuppositions is the contradiction between them and the shared knowledge or assumptions. For example,
　　[4] He cried before he finished writing the novel.
　　 >> He finished writing the novel.
　　But in [5] this kind of presupposition is suspended.
　　 [5] He died before he finished writing the novel.
　　This is due to the common knowledge that a dead man can never write a novel.Essentially, the linguistic and non-linguistic factors that lead to the cancellation or suspension of pragmatic presupposition are the same. The cancellation or suspension are due to the negation of presupposition under certain circumstances, either by linguistic forms or by the mutual knowledge shared by the participants in a conversation.
　　4. Conclusion
　　In a word, the previous discussion can lead us to the idea that pragmatic presupposition bearing the following five defining properties: mutuality,felicity, dynamicity, subjectivity and defeasibility, which constitute the whole framework of pragmatic presupposition and determine its usage in communication. The notion of pragmatic presupposition can be defined as the speaker’s appropriate dynamic assumption of the hearer’s cognitive state.■
　　
　　References
　　[1]Frege, G. 1952. On Sense and Reference. In P.T. Geach and M. Black (eds.) Translations from the Philosophical Writtings of Gottlob Frege. Oxford: Blacewell, pp.56-78.
　　[2]Grundy, P. 2000. Doing Pragmatics. London: Edward Anorld.
　　[3]Levinson, S. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
　　[4]Matthews, P. H. 2000. Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.
　　[5]Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. (1995) Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.
　　[6]Stalnaker, R. 1973. Presuppositions. Journal of Philosophical Logic 2, 447-457.
　　[7]Yule, G. (1996) Pragmatics. London: Oxford University Press.
　　[8]何兆熊. 2000. 新编语用学概要[M]. 上海外语教育出版社.
　　[9]熊学亮. 1999.认知语用学概论[M]. 上海外语教育出版社.
　　作者简介:
　　刘智慧(1979-),男,湖南益阳人,湖南财政经济学院外语系教师,研究方向为英语语言学、翻译理论。

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