Abstract

This book is an important study of the place of presuppositions in transformational linguistic theory. The author defends the standard theory of linguistic description found in Chomsky’s earlier work and in the semantic theories which are based on it against recent proposals by generative semanticists that presuppositions are part of semantics. She develops a systematic and sustained argument for the exclusion of presuppositions from semantics and their inclusion in a separate, pragmatic theory. It is the author’s contention that syntax and semantics are two separate but related components of a linguistic theory, that deep structure is syntactic, that the information included within the semantic component of linguistic theory does not include referential and contextual conditions, and consequently, that presuppositional relations are not a proper subject of formal linguistics. Their inclusion in a formal linguistic theory, she maintains, will nullify its predictive power.