Chapter 1 Literature Review
1.1 An Overview of Presupposition
In this section, the author will trace the historical origin as well as the generaldevelopment of some theories on presupposition. Presupposition is a topic that is widely discussed by many linguists, and there ismore literature on presupposition than on almost any other topic in pragmatics(Levinson, 1997: 167). The phenomenon of presupposition was first noticed by aGerman philosopher, Frege, who explored the nature of Reference and referringexpressions and created a theory of presupposition. Frege (1952) states in his paper OnSense and Reference that if anything is asserted, there is always an obviouspresupposition that the simple or compound proper names used have a reference. Forexample, if one asserts "Kepler died in misery.”, he presupposes that the name 'Kepler' designates something"( Levinson, 1997:169). In other words, there is a truth value inthese sentences and each of the referring expressions actually refers to an appropriateobject or objects when one utters these declarative sentences. Here, we can note that Frege makes some supplements to his theory ofpresupposition. He finds out that the negative counterpart of "Kepler died in misery"also presupposes that there was a man called Kepler. In other words, the samepresupposition still exists in its corresponding negative sentence.Therefore, Frege's theory of presupposition can be summarized as "(1) Referringphrases and temporal clauses carry presuppositions to the effect that they do in fact refer.(2) A sentence and its negative counterpart share the same set of presuppositions. (3) Inorder for an assertion or a sentence to be either true or false, its presuppositions must betrue or satisfied" (Levinson, 2017:170).
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1.2 A Review of Study on Business Letters
The reason why effective communication can make great contribution to thebusiness organization is that successful messages eliminate unnecessary information,save time and expense, create favorable impression, and enhance goodwill. There aremany forms of business communication, such as letters, reports, faxes, e-mails and soon, among which the business letter is the most frequently used.EBLs, one of the significant means in business communication, are attracting thewide attention of people interested and working in this field. Most scholars focus on thepoliteness in business letters in these years. Pilegaard (1997) has published an articlenamed Politeness in Written Business Discourse: A text-linguistic perspective onrequests examining the politeness principles and practicing strategies in businesscommunication. Zheng & Wang's Politeness and It'sRepresentation in Business English Communication also studies the politeness inbusiness communication. In a word, the studies on the politeness in businesscorrespondence are really plentiful, while the achievements are theoretically andpractically significant.In order to study the functions of pragmatic presupposition in EBLs, we need tohave a thorough understanding of EBLs. In this section, the author will mainly discussthe features of business letters.
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Chapter 2 The Theoretical Foundations for the Study
2.1 Features of Presupposition
With the appearance of a large amount of literature, presupposition is led to variousdefinitions. Levinson (1983:387) defines，英语论文题目，英语毕业论文
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