The Delimitation Of Presupposition

Presupposition is a very important concept in Semantics and Pragmatics. There is no given definition or delimitation for this concept. Linguists and philosophers adopt various tests for presupposition. Negation used to be the test for presupposition, as presupposition was defined as a special species of entailment that can survive negation. This definition is untenable because the scope of negation is not decided and the so-called presupposition may fall into the scope of negation. So the scope of negation is a very important issue in the theory of presupposition. The nature of negation is discussed in Chapter I and 2. The preferable interpretation of negation that our intuition chooses is internal negation, because it contains more information. But the author's view is that external negation is the nature of negation because the external negation of a sentence entails the counterpart internal negation. The preferable interpretation of negation may not be consistent with the nature of negation.Presupposition and implicature are both intuition-based pragmatic inferences distinct from the logical inferences like entailment. Chapter 2 mainly deals with presupposition, implicature and intuition. This paper tries to explain the phenomenon closely related to intuition with information principle.Some Reductionists equal presupposition to other species of inferences like entailment, conventional or conversational implicature. Chapter 3 tries to make a distinction between these concepts. And the comparison of presupposition and conversational implicature is discussed separately because they perform in the similar way in some contexts. They can both be canceled or suspended in negation or conditionals.