A cognitive pragmatic approach is taken to some long-standing problem cases of negation, the so-called presupposition denial cases. It is argued that a full account of the processes and levels of representation involved in their interpretation typically requires the sequential pragmatic derivation of two different propositions expressed. The first is one in which the presupposition is preserved and, following the rejection of this, the second involves the echoic (metalinguistic) use of material falling in the scope of the negation. The semantic base for these processes is the standard anti-presuppositionalist wide-scope negation. A different view, developed by Burton-Roberts (1989a, b), takes presupposition to be a semantic relation encoded in natural language and so argues for a negation operator that does not cancel presuppositions. This view is shown to be flawed, in that it makes the false prediction that presupposition denial cases are semantic contradictions and it is based on too narrow a view of the role of pragmatic inferencing.

In this article I argue that both bare infinitival and participial complements of perception verbs in English are clausal constituents headed by the functional category Aspect, and differ only with respect to their aspectual value. Further, I argue that perception verbs license aspectual complements by virtue of being able to function as event control predicates, that is, they allow a control relation to be established between their own and the event argument provided by the predicate of the complement clause. It is shown that the entire cluster of syntactic and semantic properties that characterize direct perception constructions follows from the proposed analysis, in conjunction with independently motivated principles of grammar.

In this paper, we explore the interaction between lexical semantics and pragmatics. We argue that linguistic processing is informationally encapsulated and utilizes relatively simple ‘taxonomic’ lexical semantic knowledge. On this basis, defeasible lexical generalisations deliver defeasible parts of logical form. In contrast, pragmatic inference is open-ended and involves arbitrary real-world knowledge. Two axioms specify when pragmatic defaults override lexical ones. We demonstrate that modelling this interaction allows us to achieve a more refined interpretation of words in a discourse context than either the lexicon or pragmatics could do on their own.

This paper presents an analysis of quantifier and wh-operator scope in terms of a lexicalized theory of quantifier storage, within the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. The proposed analysis provides an alternative to the derivational approach wherein quantifier scope is determined at a separate level of representation via movement, and shows how scope of quantifiers and wh-phrases (fronted or in situ) can be handled in a unified way in a constraint-based grammar. Lexicalization of quantifier storage offers an account of scope facts in raising and unbounded dependency constructions which have been problematic in an earlier constraint-based approach to quantifier scope.

As a contribution to the long-standing controversy in linguistics concerning the proper role in the grammar of syntax as opposed to the lexicon and of syntax as opposed to morphology, we study here the proposal made by Rivero 1992 that Modern Greek has a productive syntactic rule of Adverb Incorporation, and more generally Argument Incorporation. Based on measures of productivity and on idiosyncrasies in meaning that adverb-plus-verb and object-plus-verb combinations in Greek show, we argue that the phenomena in question are compounds or affixed forms that result from the operation of lexical rules. They are thus quintessentially morphological in nature, rather than syntactic. More generally, we see this outcome as an argument against frameworks in which morphology is collapsed into the syntactic component and in which morphology is not a separate component of grammar.