Studies on Presupposition文献综述.docVIP

Literature Review Studies on Presupposition Presupposition is originated in the field of philosophy, and it was firstly proposed by a German philosopher, Gottlob Frege in his classical paper on sense and reference. He points out “If anything is asserted, there is always an obvious presupposition that the simple or compound proper names used have a reference. If one therefore asserts, Kepler died in misery, there is a presupposition that the name ‘Kepler’ designates something. Later, Frege finds that the same presupposition would be obtained in the corresponding negate sentence, then he adds that the name “Kepler” designates something is just as much a presupposition of the assertion Kepler died in misery, as for the negative assertion. In addition, Frege makes a similar observation concerning temporal clauses, claiming that the time sequences are presupposed. In 1905, in the article “On Denoting”, the British philosopher Bertrand Russel proposes his famous theory of descriptions, thinking that there are many problems in Frege’s views. In his theory of definite descriptions, he claims that a definite description, such as “the king of France”, “the king of France is bald”, was a conjunction of three assertions: “There is a king of France”, “There is only one king of France”, and “There is nothing that is king of France and is not bald”. Russel holds that if one of the propositions in the conjunctions of propositions is false, then the whole utterance with conjunctions of proposition is false. Russel’s theory was dominant in the field of presupposition study until 1950 when P.E.Strawson proposes a quite different approach, thus pushing the study of the presupposition into a new stage. He enlarges the scope of presupposition, besides definite descriptions and proper names, qualification noun phases; some other parts of an utterance like temporal clause and change-of-state words are included. Zhuyongsheng and Miaoxingwei point out that it is actually Strawson’s concepti