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Exploring a ‘Pragmatic Ambiguity’ of Negation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Alyson Pitts
Alyson Pitts*
Affiliation:
University of Turku
*
Department of English, University of Turku, 20014-Turku, Finland [alyson.pitts@utu.fi]
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Abstract

This article explores a ‘pragmatic ambiguity’ of negation in English, first discussed by Horn (1985, 1989:Ch.6) in his appeal to an intuitive division between ordinary, ‘descriptive’ negation and marked, ‘metalinguistic’ uses of negation in everyday language. The main agenda is to better understand what such a pragmatic ambiguity of negation really amounts to: are there sufficient grounds to posit TWO types of negation, and what prevents Horn's PRAGMATIC ambiguity from being SEMANTIC in its nature?

In this article, I review the key features promoted by Horn as characteristic of the purported duality in negation—particularly those posited for marked, metalinguistic uses of negation, such as resistance to prefixal incorporation, failure to trigger negative polarity items, and employment of the paradigmatic not X but Y construction. I then consider and evaluate subsequent attempts to posit a finer-grained analysis of metalinguistic negation, as endorsed by Foolen (1991) and Geurts (1998). The article concludes by upholding the so-called pragmatic ambiguity, but advises due caution with regard to Horn's diagnostics when appealing to this intuitive distinction of negation within use.

Keywords

metalinguistic negationdescriptive negationpragmatic ambiguitydiagnostics

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 87 , Issue 2 , June 2011, pp. 346 - 368
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 Linguistic Society of America

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