8. Descriptive and metalinguistic negation

The main goal of this chapter is to explain why natural language needs negative predicates to express negative contents. In contrast with syntactic negation, negative predicates exhibit some semantic properties, which are not expressed syntactically: they are complete semantically, restricted to lexical categories, and encode a negative feature. On the other hand, negative predicates are motivated pragmatically: they are stronger statements than syntactic negation; they realize, under syntactic negation, mitigated assertions; they cannot express metalinguistic negation, as syntactic negation does. One relevant semantic proposal (Horn 1989) is the distinction between two negation operators: ¬, realized syntactically, and ©, realized lexically. This chapter does not only give arguments supporting these properties, but also provides an explicit account of the relation between syntactic negation and negative predicates.

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Reinforcing negation: The case of Italian

Proceedings of the International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar ◽

10.21248/hpsg.2006.10 ◽

2006 ◽

Author(s):

Danièle Godard ◽

Jean-Marie Marandin

Keyword(s):

The Other ◽

General Construction ◽

Negative Sentence ◽

Metalinguistic Negation ◽

Other Hand ◽

The One

We study the formal and pragmatic properties of the ˋreinforced negation construction' in Italian, which, unlike the regular negative sentence, contains both non and an n-word in preverbal position. On the one hand, this construction relies on a more general construction (positive or negative), which is pragmatically associated with reprise assertion, on the other hand, it uses non without the usual constraints attached to it. We propose that this unfaithful recycling is a pattern for creating a form dedicated to metalinguistic negation. Our analysis integrates both negative types of negative forms with their formal and pragmatic properties.

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Metalinguistic negation and pragmatic ambiguity

Pragmatics ◽

10.1075/prag.1.2.02foo ◽

1991 ◽

Vol 1 (2) ◽

pp. 217-237 ◽

Cited By ~ 12

Author(s):

Ad Foolen

Keyword(s):

Metalinguistic Negation

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Negation and Presupposition

The Oxford Handbook of Negation ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830528.013.22 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 368-388

Author(s):

David Beaver ◽

Kristin Denlinger

Keyword(s):

Scope Ambiguity ◽

Metalinguistic Negation

Over a century of scholarship on presupposition has worked towards reconciling two seemingly contrary properties of these types of inferences: the ability to project through embedding like negation, and the ability to be cancelled explicitly. Describing these properties has been key to not only diagnosing presuppositions, but also differentiating them from other types of inferences like implicatures and entailment and understanding how a theory of presupposition could apply cross-linguistically. This chapter outlines different accounts of presupposition and negation, focusing on six different broad approaches: scope ambiguity, trivalent ambiguity, underspecification, metalinguistic negation, cancellation, and accommodation. These accounts differ with respect to whether they account for default projection, the mechanisms through which projection is derived, and whether entailments and implicatures are targeted by the same negation operators as presuppositions.

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Metalinguistic Negation

The Oxford Handbook of Negation ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198830528.013.20 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 348-368

Author(s):

Ana Maria Martins

Keyword(s):

Language Acquisition ◽

Eye Tracking ◽

Polarity Items ◽

Metalinguistic Negation ◽

Different Types ◽

Extensive Bibliography

This chapter introduces the reader to the concept of ‘metalinguistic negation’ as defined by Horn (1989), the extensive bibliography on the topic, and the main issues it considers and debates. Besides the pragmatic and semantic matters that have been at the heart of the literature’s discussions, the chapter also considers syntactic aspects of metalinguistic negation, extending the focus from not-sentences to a broader coverage of the ways metalinguistic negation can be grammatically expressed, including different types of unambiguous metalinguistic negation markers (e.g. idioms, such as like hell, wh- phrases, and locative/temporal deictics). The interaction between metalinguistic negation and polarity items is considered central to separate ‘metalinguistic’ from ‘descriptive’ negation. The distinction between metalinguistic negation and the concepts of denial and contrastive negation is also clarified. Brief notice is given of investigations in language acquisition, ERP and eye-tracking, which may put to the test the cognitive reality of metalinguistic negation.

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