Presupposition, Focus And The Scope Ambiguity Of Negation

This thesis investigates some aspects of negation, which includes external negation and internal negation, the relationship between focus and the scope of negation, in the light of the Model Theory, the thesis provides semantic interpretation to negative focus and assumes that prepositional negation should be consistent with focus negation.External negation mainly includes the negation of modality and felicity condition of the sentences. The latter is also named meta-linguistic negation or pragmatic negation. Internal negation refers to negating the truth condition of the proposition. For this reason, internal negation is also named logical negation. Under the normal stress, logical negation is realized by negating the relation between predicates and arguments. Since the negative operators are characterized by the property of "association with focus", the constituent that is actually negated in a sentence happens to be the focus of the sentence. Logical negation can be explained semantically through the same approach as the focus negation when the negative marker itself becomes the focus of the sentence. Under this occasion, the negative markers have two properties, namely, operator and variable.Given presupposition has a close relationship with external negation and focus, some important issues about presupposition and focus are also discussed in this thesis.