Verbs of Judging and Acts of Judging

Abstract

In her recently published book Presupposition and Delimitation of Semantics Kempson (1975) argues that in the work of linguists such as the Lakoffs, the Kiparskys and Fillmore, problems concerning the semantic and the pragmatic nature of presuppositions have been conflated, and, moreover, that the notion of presupposition has no place in semantics. The phenomena labelled by linguists and logicians as presuppositions can, according to her, be explained within the framework of Gricean pragmatics. In Kempson’s own treatment of a pragmatic theory, there is, however, no suggestion as to what to do with lexical presuppositions.