NEGATION, PRESUPPOSITION AND THE SEMANTICS PRAGMATICS DISTINCTION/

A cognitive pragmatic approach is taken to some long-standing problem cases of negation, the so-called presupposition denial cases. It is ar gued that a full account of the processes and levels of representation involved in their interpretation typically requires the sequential pr agmatic derivation of two different propositions expressed. The first is one in which the presupposition is preserved and, following the rej ection of this, the second involves the echoic (metalinguistic) use of material falling in the scope of the negation. The semantic base for these processes is the standard antipresuppositionalist wide-scope neg ation. A different view, developed by Burton-Roberts (1989a, b), takes presupposition to be a semantic relation encoded in natural language and so argues for a negation operator that does not cancel presupposit ions. This view is shown to be flawed, in that it makes the false pred iction that presupposition denial cases are semantic contradictions an d it is based on too narrow a view of the role of pragmatic inferencin g.