Table of Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Literature Review 2
2.1 Financial News 2
2.2 Presupposition 3
2.3 The Comparative research of Presupposition 4
2.4 Research Gap 5
3 Theoretical Framework 6
3.1 Presupposition 6
3.2 Presupposition Triggers 8
4 Research Methodology 11
4.1 Corpus Construction 11
4.2 Data Collection 11
4.3 Data Analysis 12
4.4 Discussion 17
5 Conclusion 22
5.1 Findings 22
5.2 Limitations 23
5.3 Questions for further study 23
Acknowledgments 24
Bibliography 25
1 Introduction
The concept of presupposition has caught many scholars’ attention since it was proposed in 19th century. It was first proposed in the area of philosophy and introduced into the domain of linguistics later. Presuppositions appear both in English and Chinese. Till now, many scholars have already carried out the comparative researches on presupposition in English and Chinese and mainly focused on the types of presuppositions. The corpora they based on mainly include advertisements, courtroom discourses and news titles, but there’s no such research conducted on news discourse. Also there’s no research confirms that the use of presupposition in other contexts is the same with that in financial news. Since the discourse of financial news has its own features, the use of presupposition may differ from that in other discourses. This research is going to identify the similarities and differences of presupposition used in English and Chinese financial news.
2 Literature Review
2.1 Financial News
Financial news is a kind of news which has its own orientation and focus. The financial news should cover the area of finance, trade, stocks, national economic policies and mainly on the important issues (Cao, 2006). The press media should deliver the financial and economic information to the public together with related analysis and predication. Some scholars pides financial news into two categories, one is the broad sense of financial news, which mainly focuses on the news that covers the whole society and closely related to people’s daily economic life while the other category is the narrow sense of financial news, focusing on the factor market including capital market, financial market and investment (Yuan, 2014). The second category is more professional and is provided to the specialized persons. This research is focused on the broad sense of financial news.
Due to the specificity of the subject it reports, financial news has its own discourse features. The four features are abstraction, relevance, widely use of future tense and strong implication (Chen, 2000). On linguistic level, one feature of financial news is the widely use of comparative verbs and adjectives since financial news needs to describe the tendency of rise and fall of economy through comparative verbs and compare the economic situation through the use of comparative degree of adjectives (Wei, 2008).
News usually needs to convey new information based on some already known information due to people’s cognitive habits, and it is the same to financial news. Besides, financial news also requires some special background knowledge due to its professional feature. If not based on the background information and known information when delivering new information, the news will make readers confused and hard to understand (Zhang, 2008). Such known information, background information and professional knowledge are called “shared experience” (Xu, 2010). Journalism Concise Dictionary also includes the item of “background information of news” and explains it as the explanation of history, background information and reasons of news events, and it is used to explain the subjective and objective factors of events and to serve the topic. Besides the back ground information, financial news is also in great relevance with many other financial events, some are historical and some are taking place right now. So the news is not isolated but related to many factors (Chen, 2000). 英汉财经新闻中的预设对比研究(2):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_21550.html