Empty Names, Presupposition Failure, and Metalinguistic Negation

When it comes to empty names, we seem to have reached very little consensus. Still, we all seem to agree, first, that our semantics should assign truth to (one reading of) negative singular existence statements in which an empty name occurs and, second, that names are used in such statements. The purpose of this paper is to show that ruling out that the names are mentioned is harder than it has been thought. I will present a new metalinguistic account for negative singular existence statements in which an empty name occurs, and I will show that the account can deal both with the objections to the traditional metalinguistic account and with other objections that seem to target my new proposal.

Negative Predicates

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.

Negation and Presupposition

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.

Metalinguistic Negation

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.

Negation, Prosody, and Gesture

This chapter describes the current state of the art with regard to the contribution of prosody and gesture to the semantic and pragmatic expression and interpretation of negation. A review of the literature shows that three types of speech acts involving negation (e.g. denial, rejection, and metalinguistic negation) can be encoded through differentiated prosodic and gestural means across languages. Negative elements in denials tend to be prosodically highlighted through the use of high tones in tonal languages or pitch accentual prominence in intonational languages. By contrast, specific intonational contours are used differently across languages to express a speech act of rejection, whether in questions or in statements. Metalinguistic or corrective speech acts, which express a speaker’s attitude of disapproval, can also be identified by means of prosodic prominence. All three types of speech act tend to be accompanied by specific gestures. This chapter also shows the central role played by prosody and gesture in the interpretation of the semantic scope of negation, as well as in the interpretation of negative shifts affecting so-called double negation phenomena and bare polar particle responses. The chapter concludes by analyzing the interaction between prosodic and gestural modes of communication in adult and child speech, and suggests possible avenues for further research on the prosody–gesture negation interface.

The (en)rich(ed) meaning of expletive negation

This contribution addresses the issue of one of the instances of non-standard negation, the so-called expletive negation (EN). Though it discusses data from a variety of languages, it mainly concentrates on Italian, proposing that the behavior of EN in comparative, exclamative and temporal clauses warrants an analysis of EN in terms of an operator of implicature denial. This approach derives the fact that EN is truth-conditionally irrelevant from the fact that the semantics of negation as a truth-value reversal operator is shifted, in the case of EN, to the layer of implicated meaning. The analysis has a number of interesting consequences for the notion of metalinguistic negation. It further derives many of the interpretive effects normally linked to the so-called evaluative analysis of EN, and is compatible with a new set of data showing that EN scopally interacts with other negative elements. Finally, the proposal advanced here has a number of non-trivial implications regarding the relation between morphosyntax and the systems of interpretation, potentially affecting the standard view of language within cognition.

How speakers interpret the negative markers no and no…pas in Catalan

This paper reports the results of an experimental investigation designed to test the interpretation of the optional doubling of the negative markersnoandpasin Expletive Negation (EN) contexts and in preverbal Negative Concord Items (NCI) contexts in Catalan. We show that in EN contexts a negative interpretation ofnois preferred to an expletive one, with non-negative readings being less widespread than expected from what is described in traditional grammars. In NCI contexts the overt presence ofnobasically contributes to a single negation interpretation, thus confirming the status of Catalan as a Negative Concord language. We also show that, in the absence of discourse environments,pasin both EN and NCI contexts shows a variable interpretation, a characteristic of negative polarity items. Our results indicate thatpasdoes not increase the amount of negative interpretation ofnoin EN contexts, or of double negation in NCI contexts, but is an item dependent on the interpretation ofno. We conclude that the strengthening role of Catalanpas(at stage two of Jespersen’s cycle), while associated with the expression of metalinguistic negation, does not reverse the truth or falsity of a proposition.