A Discussion on Tonhauser’s Theory:

Diagnosing At-Issueness in Mandarin Chinese Utterance 

ABSTRACT

At-issueness is a relatively new linguistic concept which has been developing during recent years in the field of Pragmatics. It is an efficient method to avoid the controversy over the classification of meanings, especially the distinction between presuppositions and conventional implicatures. It also answers to the projection properties of certain propositions. As a new linguistic concept, at-issueness is still in the developing period and does not enjoy powerful theoretical support from abundant academic works.

Therefore, setting at-issueness as the topic of this dissertation is based on the hope that the field of at-issueness could be added with more information and findings. This dissertation takes a practical step towards at-issueness, and aims to provide a thorough diagnostics of the at-issue contents in the Chinese language based on Tonhauser’s theory. To convert Tonhauser’s theory into practical method for Chinese at-issue content diagnostics, content types in Chinese are determined before the application of diagnostics.

In addition to that, this dissertation also seeks to identify potential problems or dysfunctions of the previous diagnostics. With problems identified, certain improvements could be made on the diagnostics to fit into the Chinese language environment. Tonhauser established a set of diagnostics to determine the at-issue content in an utterance. This dissertation hopes to establish a new set of diagnostics after justifying the validity of the diagnostics in Chinese, and to see if there are other practical functions of the diagnostics, which might add practical value to the at-issueness.

Keywords: At-issueness, Pragmatics, projection, diagnostics