英语商务会议演讲语用预设的应用分析

Chapter 1 Introduction

With the rapid development of economic globalization，more and more countries andregions are interrelated, world economy being combined into a total. As the largestdeveloping country, China continuously spares no effort to strengthen cross-bordercooperation and expand international exchanges to have better connection with worldeconomic organizations so as to promote the development of its economy. In thiscontinuing course of dealing, language is closely related to economic development. Thelink between them is especially reflected on the fact that language promotes economic andtrade cooperation. As the language tool in international economic and trade activities,business English can not be too important for international trade. And as a tool to conductinternational business communication as well as the bargaining chip to make successfuldeals, business conference speech, the object of the study, is an essential part of businessEnglish. Therefore, it is of great importance to have a study about business conferencespeeches to promote international economic, trade and cultural exchanges.The relevant business conferences hosted by various organizations have played animportant role in promoting economic growth, cooperation, trade and investment and theyprovide a good stage for different countries and regions to exchange ideas and thoughtswith the world. Study into business conference speeches has its practical significance asthe purpose of speeches in business conferences is to convey business information to orshare feelings with the audience by persuading, informing or entertaining them,I International economic organizations develop with the world economy and there arediverse international business conferences held by various economic organizations allthrough the year, among which APEC，WTO, and UNCTAD are inseparable from theeconomic development of China. Therefore, the research objects in this thesis are businessconference speeches selected from these three organizations.Not only businessmen have drawn their attention on these business conferencespeeches, linguists have also done relevant research and they have studied businessspeeches from diverse perspectives. Some scholars focused on the genre analysis ortranslation of business English speeches(Yang Weiwei，2007; Chen Zeze，2009; Wang Li，2009; Xiong Xiaohong, 2011)，others focused on them from the perspective ofmetaphor(Xu Bing, 2005; Jiang Xia, 2007) and still others study them from the point ofsystemic-functional grammar(Wang Yexuan, 2013). However, few studies were conductedfrom the perspective of presupposition.
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Chapter 2 Literature Review

2.1 Previous Studies on Business Conference Speeches
Business conference speeches, the research subject of this thesis, are reviewed in thissection. It is an important part of business speech, which falls into the category of publicspeaking, and public speaking plays an important role in transmitting information一persuading people to believe what speakers do； motivating people to take actions asproblem solutions or merely entertaining the audience. So, to know more or to masterpublic speaking is definitely important for our understanding of business conferencespeeches. Previous studies about public speaking are firstly introduced and then thedefinition，classification and features of effective business conference speeches arediscussed in detail. When it comes to the term "public speaking”，there are almost as many definitions asthere are books written to explain it. Byms(1997) gives his definition of public speaking,that is, "it is a deliberative type of communication", in which sense the speaker decides thegoals of a speech, prepares the intended messages and delivers the speech. Dance, FrankE. X.，Zak-Dance and Carol C. (1996) define that "public speaking is the activity of usingspoken language to communicate with many individuals at the same time". In this definition，it is the speakers who determine the desirable results of public speaking with aview to reaching certain aims through communication. Domestic scholar HuShuzhong(2002) defines it as "rhetor in Greek means orator, public speaker and rhetoricmeans public speaking". In conclusion, public speaking is the art through which thespeakers present their ideas or conviction to a group of people in an organized, deliberatemanner with the purpose of adding to the knowledge and wisdom of listeners, influencingtheir attitudes or behaviors，or just entertaining them.Not all communication involves speaking, nor can all speaking be considered publicspeaking. Seven characteristics or components define public speaking and set it apart frominformal speaking that we usually engage in. Every message has a source, or a point oforigin. The source of a speech is the speaker. Since speaking is a creative process, andgood speaking is indeed an art form, it is the responsibility of the speaker to determineprecisely what the message should be and how it will be applicable to his particularaudience. The second component is the message itself. If there doesn't exist a subjectmatter, there can be no public speaking, and this is why a speaker should be exposed to therhetorical traditions of his country or culture, so that he might understand how messagesare transmitted effectively and why they are remembered. And messages must betransmitted in some manner. Channel is the third component of public speaking，or meansby which the speech is transmitted. Spoken words are carried by sound waves; facialexpressions, gestures, and movement are carried by light waves. In addition, publicspeaking may occur in person or be delivered over radio or television. The audience is aspecific group of people to whom the speech message is directed. And normally, when aspeech is delivered, audience are those that heard the speech in fact. Feedback is the fifthelement of public speaking. As soon as information is provided to the speaker, he or shecan easily assess the influence of his or her speech on the audience. Noise is anything thatinterferes with communication, and some forms of noise are always present. There are twokinds of noise，external and internal. The final component is known as situation orenvironment. It is the setting in which a speech is presented that affects the expectations ofthe audience, the meaning audience members receive, and their subsequent behavior.

2.2 Reviews on Presupposition
A presupposition is the background belief related to an utterance，which must bemutually known or assumed by both the addresser and the addressee for the utterance to beconsidered and it is a very important concept in pragmatics. As Levinson (2001:167) puts it,“In pragmatics, the literature on presupposition is more than that on almost all the othertopics.,. This topic has been approached from different perspectives by different scholars,and various kinds of relevant theories are delivered. In this part, the historical backgroundof presupposition is reviewed at the beginning, and then semantic presupposition andpragmatic presupposition are studied respectively. Since the present research is to study theapplication of pragmatic presupposition in business conference speeches, thepresupposition theory adopted in this thesis is pragmatically oriented，involving its notionand properties. At last, presupposition triggers are studied in detail. Presupposition is a subject widely studied by linguists nowadays, but actually it wasoriginally studied by philosophers and logicians. In 1892，the presupposition phenomenonwas first proposed by the German mathematician and philosopher Gottlob Frege in hisclassical paper On Sense and Reference ? He held that，“If anything is asserted there isalways an obvious presupposition that the simple or compound proper names used have areference" (Frege, 1892(1952：69)).But Bertrand Russell, a British mathematician and philosopher, opposed Frege'sviews and he proposes a well-known theory of descriptions. In his view, the entirestatement with the whole spectrum of propositions will be false, if one of the propositionsin them is false. For example, according to Levinson( 1983:171), anyone who asserts thesentence “The king of France is wise" would be asserting at the same time that: (1) There exists a king of France. (2) The king is one and only.(3) He is wise, (The person mentioned here has the property of being the king ofFrance.)If the assertion (1) “There exists a king of France，，is proven to be false, the wholesentence “The king of France is wise，，，is simply false.Russell's analysis remained largely dominant for a long period. While afterwards,Strawson, a British linguist, proposed a quite different approach. And in 1952, he explicitlyused the term “presupposition in his book Introduction to Logical Theory, Strawson'sviewpoints on presupposition can be summarized as below:One statement can presuppose another statement if:(a) if the former is true, then the later is true.(b) if the former is false, then the later is true.Indeed, the study of presupposition came into a new stage as Strawson proposed hisviews of point on presupposition, and it soon came to be one of the major propositions andfiercely discussed topics among pragmatic researchers in 1970s. Among all the definitionsproposed by different researchers, Robert Stalnake's definition of pragmatic presuppositionis the most powerful one and it was elaborated in his book Pragmatics, He wrote,“Presuppositions are complex dispositions which can be manifested in certain linguisticcircumstances. The presuppositions tend to be in both the utterances one may make and thequestions one introduces. Other linguists such as Karttunen, Lucia H.B. Manara & AnneDe Roeck，and Piwek，P. & E. Krahmer take real contexts into consideration and they allstudy it from the pragmatic perspective.

Chapter 3 Theoretical Framework.........21

3.1 Basic Notions .........21

Chapter 4 Research Methodology..... 29

4.1 Research Questions ...........29

4.2 Data Collection ...29

4.3 Instrument ...........30

4.4 Data Analysis .......31

Chapter 5 Results and Discussion......... 32

5.1 Explicitly Triggered Pragmatic Presuppositions in the Corpus of BCSs ......32

Chapter 5 Results and Discussion

5.1 Explicitly Triggered Pragmatic Presuppositions in the Corpus ofBCSs
As the figure in chapter 3 shown, explicitly triggered pragmatic presuppositions atlexical levels can be studied from two aspects: presupposition triggers and nominalizationpresuppositions. The former mainly include restrictive expressions, verbs(implicative verbs,factive verbs, iterative verbs, change-of-state verbs and verbs of judging), iterativeparticles, and other particles. In the following part, these four kinds of lexicalpresupposition triggers and nominalization will be discussed at length. Representativeexamples selected from the corpus of BCSs will be given to illustrate the specificapplication of lexical presupposition triggers and nominalization presupposition. Inaddition, in order to analyze the use of different presupposition triggers, representativepresupposition triggers and their frequency and percentage are listed and counted. In theprocess, AntConc and WPS Excel are employed to get the frequency and percentage ofeach searched lexical presupposition triggers. From the examples (1), (2), and (3)，the above articles "a" ,an and thecanpresuppose that the entities or state which the speakers are talking about really exist. In thisway, the audience can believe the truth of the information given by the speakers, thus beingon the same side of the fence. The possessive determiner “its” used in example (1) tellsthe listeners a fact that though the fast-growing country has exporters, its citizens should also share in the prosperity. Another possessive determiner "our" appeared in example (2)shows that as they have respective constituents, it is important to share the findings withthem. The demonstrative pronoun that in example (2) presupposes the information thathas been mentioned in the former part of the sentence and it can make the whole sentencecohesive. The indefinite pronoun “all” in example (3) shows the fact that supply chainproduction has been widespread and international dimensions have become the focus point.Table 4.1 shows some representative examples of restrictive expressions aspresupposition triggers and their frequency and percentage. As subjects and objects aremost important for sentences，the number of articles that used before nouns and nounphrases is more than that of other kinds and it accounts for 86.11% of restrictiveexpressions.

5.2 Implicitly Evaluative Pragmatic Presuppositions
As has been discussed in chapter 3, implicitly evaluative pragmatic presuppositions atlexical levels can be studied from three aspects: evaluative nouns, verbs and adjectives. Evaluative nouns mainly include factual nouns，modal nouns，mental nouns, linguisticnouns, and quantifying nouns. Evaluative verbs are mainly divided into activity verbs,communication verbs and mental verbs. These two kinds of evaluative words are studiedby qualitative and quantitative methods. In order to analyze the use of different evaluativenouns and verbs，representative examples and their frequency and percentage are listed andcounted with the help of AntConc and WPS Excel. Afterwards, specific examples selectedfrom the corpus of BCSs are given to illustrate how evaluative adjectives are used topresuppose information. Nouns which are involved with a factual existence or state, such as “fact”，“evidence“difference"problem" and so on，are called factual nouns. The presupposed informationfollowing such nouns can be treated as a fact. In business conference speeches, modalnouns refer to the nouns that allow the delivers to mark their stance, such as “possibility”，“certainty”，“likelihood“necessity“tendency’，and so on. Mental nouns including“concern“worry”，“hope“impressionetc. are used to indicate the speaker's mentalstatus and his or her value orientation. Linguistic nouns are nouns relating to linguistics.This kind of evaluative nouns includes “claim’’，“order”，“information”，“report’’，etc.Quantifying nouns are those that are used to indicate quantity, such as "bit", "percentage",“degree"majority" and so on.In the process of data collecting, the plurals of these evaluative nouns are included inthe statistics. However, some verbs with the forms of evaluative nouns are excluded one byone manually. With the help of AntConc, the summary of frequency and percentage ofthese five kinds of evaluative nouns is presented in the table below.
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Chapter 6 Conclusion

On the basis of analysis in the above chapters, pragmatic presupposition used inbusiness conference speeches can be divided into explicitly triggered pragmaticpresupposition and implicitly evaluative pragmatic presupposition.At lexical levels, explicitly triggered pragmatic presuppositions are studied frompresupposition triggers and nominalization presuppositions. According to Table 4.land4.10, restrictive expressions and nominalization presuppositions are most frequently usedcompared with others to explicitly trigger pragmatic presupposition in business conferencespeeches. Subjects and objects can not be in defect in sentences, restrictive expressions andnominalization structures are used as elementary parts for delivers to trigger information toinform the listeners, then they can achieve their speech goals. What's more, nominalizationprocess triggers presupposition by making a process，，into a thingand it changes thestructure of theme and rheme so that the unknown and unshared information can beconveyed covertly to the listeners. Statistics in Table 4.2 show that speakers tend to usemore change-of-state verbs than other kinds of verbs in business conference speeches.With the pragmatic presupposition triggered by this kind of verbs, listeners can have anidea of what have happened to the world and what measures have been made by theseorganizations to accelerate development.Within the scope of syntactical-based explicit pragmatic presupposition, comparative structures and temporal clauses are frequently used in business conference speeches, whichhave illustrated in section 4.1.2.2 and 4.1.2.3. By means of these presuppositions, speakerscan show listeners that everything is changing all the time. To know the changes that havehappened or will happen and its time is of great importance for people who throwthemselves into commercial affairs so that they can take active measures to response tothose changes or turns.A better understanding of information triggered by presupposition triggers andnominalization can make us have a clearer understanding of business conference speeches.While some information cannot be obtained only from the surface of language, some deepmeanings may hide after the discourse. So to have a deep understanding of these speechesand to comprehend the real intentions of the speakers, we explore the use of implicitlyevaluative pragmatic presuppositions in business conference speeches at lexical andsyntactical levels as well.At lexical levels, we find that in business conference speeches，delivers chooseevaluative nouns, verbs and adjectives to give voice to their thought or attitude tosomething, which may exert a subtle influence on listeners, thus transmitting evaluativepresuppositions and achieving speech goals.When it comes to the syntactical level of implicitly evaluative pragmaticpresuppositions, subjects with no definite reference and negative structures are used bydelivers to transmit evaluative meanings implicitly in business conference speeches, thusachieving speech goals such as to inform, to persuade and so on.
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参考文献（略）