3.5  Structural Presupposition                 ... .  17

3.6  Counterfactual Presupposition                . . ..21

3.7  Context Presupposition                   . ..22

3.8  Summary of Presuppositions               .... 23

3.9  Functions of Presuppositions in the Murders in the Rue Morgue    ... 23

Conclusion                             25

Acknowledgements                         ..27

Bibliography                         ...  ..28

1 Introduction

As a significant concept in logical semantics, presupposition is generally used in many aspects, such as communicating, negotiating, advertising, creating and so on. Detective stories are very popular around the world. Many authors and their works are well known, such as Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe and etc. This thesis explores the application of presupposition in detective stories. As detective stories are a literary form, detective stories are usually studied in literature, but this thesis provides a new angle of presupposition to appreciate these detective stories for the readers. 源:自'优尔.·论,文;网·www.youerw.com/

1.1 The Previous Study of Presupposition 

Presupposition is an important concept in linguistics, logics and philosophy of language which was first noticed when the German philosopher Frege was distinguishing sense and reference, then he used it to explain some cases of semantics-logics in his On Sense and Reference in 1892. 

In 1960s presupposition was gradually studied in linguistics and greatly developed in semantics. In 1970s Stalnaker, Keenan and other linguisticians found that presupposition is closely associated with context, which requires the fitness of presupposition, and presupposition is also the public information known by everyone when communicating. In 1980, many linguisticians, such as Fillmore, Fauconnier and Lakoff put presupposition into the theory framework of cognitive semantics. Then presupposition approached the application of language instead of the analysis of semantics-logics, it meant that people pay more attention to the pragmatic presupposition in the use and understanding of language instead of semantics presupposition, thus presupposition was pided into these two parts. 

At home, Professor Hu Hongze thinks presupposition should be classified into two parts: the semantics and the pragmatics. Semantic presupposition’s point is the truth of the sentences, pragmatic presupposition focuses on the presupposition’s context and communicators’ common background. He thinks these two kinds of presupposition are complementary instead of contradictory. Chinese scholar Guo Yukai(1988: 153) has generalized the studies on presupposition as “ the presupposition theory is still in a exploratory stage, there is no absolute definition, even the classification of it is also a matter of academic discussion.” So many scholars pay more attention to the application of presupposition rather than the theory itself. Some researchers study its application in advertising, debating, translation and so on. Zhou Wei ever made a research which analyzes how the characters in Pride and Prejudice achieve their communicative purpose through the presupposition used in their dialogues.

Pragmatic presupposition which not only has something to do with language forming, but also associates with context factors and pragmatic ratiocination is a kind of illation. People also have noticed presupposition’s effect of creating utterance and how to realize social effect through presupposition.