Presuppositions and two kinds of negation

Abstract

In this paper I deal with sentences that come with a presupposition that is entailed by the positive as well as negated form of a given sentence. However, there are two kinds of negation, namely narrow-scope and wide-scope negation. I am going to prove that while the former is presupposition-preserving, the latter is presupposition -denying. Thus the main contribution of this paper is the proof that these two kinds of negation are not equivalent. This issue has much in common with the difference between topic and focus articulation within a sentence. Whereas articulating the topic of a sentence activates a presupposition, articulating the focus frequently yields merely an entailment. My background theory is Transparent Intensional Logic (TIL). TIL is an expressive logic apt for the analysis of sentences with presuppositions, because in TIL we work with partial functions, in particular with propositions with truth-value gaps. Moreover, procedural semantics of TIL makes it possible to define a general analytic schema of sentences associated with presuppositions, which is another novel contribution of this paper.