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On Aristotle and Baldness : Topic, Reference, Presupposition of Existence, and Negation

På svenska

Author

  • Johan Brandtler

Summary, in English

This paper is a contribution to the never settled debate on reference, negation and presupposition of existence in the linguistic/philosophical literature. Based on Swedish and English data, the discussion is an attempt to present a unified account of the opposing views put forward in the works of Aristotle, Frege (1892), Russell (1905) and Strawson (1950). The starting point is the observed asymmetry in Swedish (and English) that negation may precede a quantified subject NP in the first position, but not a definite subject NP or a proper name. This asymmetry is argued to be due to semantic, rather than syntactic, restrictions. In the model proposed here, negating a topic NP affects the “topic selection”. This is allowed with quantified NPs, since negating a quantifier leads only to a modification of the topic selection. For definite/generic subject NPs this cannot be allowed, since negating a definite NP equals cancelling the topic selection. This leads to a ‘crash’ at the semantic level.

Department/s

Publishing year

2006

Language

English

Publication/Series

Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax

Document type

Working paper

Topic

  • Languages and Literature

Keywords

  • negation
  • presupposition
  • implicature
  • Frege
  • Russell
  • Strawson
  • reference
  • quantifiers
  • predication
  • topic

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1100-097X