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“A Pragmatic Approach to English Negation.” Studies in English Language & Literature. 38.3 (2012): 197-216. The purpose of this study is to investigate the meaning and function of negation in natural language. To reach the goal, we present that any studies on negation would be insufficient without the help of semantics and pragmatics because negation itself is connected with meaning. In addition, the ambiguity that negation takes cannot be regarded as a syntactic phenomenon. This study discusses pragmatic ambiguity, conversational implicature, and scalarity in terms of the metalinguistic negation. First, the fact that negation is pragmatically as well as semantically ambiguous is clarified. Second, an instance which conversational implicature and its relation to negation cancels the previous statements is found in conversational implicature and its relation to negation. Third, the relation between 'less than' and 'more than' understanding arising in scalar predicates is analyzed and can be unified as only one reading, 'less than'. I present that double negation, Neg-raising, external negation, tag question, and negative question take euphemistic characteristic, by observing some psychological motivation of negation in the phenomena of euphemism. As a consequence, the effect that negation enhances the communicative performance in the social interaction is shown. In conclusion, negation is difficult to understand by simple syntactic approach. Therefore, we should explore it on the basis of semantics and pragmatics to make a more comprehensive understanding of negation. (Keimyung University)