Hostname: page-component-74656f9884-2dmjx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-09T17:51:13.673Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Mechanisms of Denial

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Bart Geurts
Bart Geurts*
Affiliation:
University of Osnabrück and Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
*
University of Osnabrück, 49069 Osnabrück, Germany [geurts@cl-ki.uni-osnabrueck.de]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Normally, the negation of a sentence S serves to reverse the assertion that S would have made, and does not affect other types of information S would have conveyed, such as presuppositions, implicatures, and so on. Occasionally, however, it seems as if negation is directed precisely at presuppositions, implicatures, or even at purely formal aspects of a sentence (such as intonation, pronunciation, and so on). The following are cases in point: Mary didn’t visit the pizzeria in the Vatican, because there is no pizzeria in the Vatican./I’m not tipsy: I’m drunk./He didn’t call the police, he called the POLICE.

I call such sentences DENIALS, and I argue against the Unitarian approach advocated by Horn and van der Sandt, among others, according to which denial is a homogeneous phenomenon that calls for a unified analysis. According to the alternative theory proposed here, there are several mechanisms of denial, but each of these is needed for independent reasons, and therefore no ad hoc mechanisms are necessary.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 74 , Issue 2 , June 1998 , pp. 274 - 307
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 by Linguistic Society of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Anscombre, J. C, and Ducrot, O. 1976. L’argumentation dans la langue. Langages 42. 5–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anscombre, J. C, and Ducrot, O. 1977. Deux mais en français? Lingua 43. 23–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bartsch, Renate. 1987. Context-dependent interpretations of lexical items. Foundations of pragmatics and lexical semantics, ed. by Groenendijk, Jeroen, Jongh, Dick de, and Stokhof, Martin, 1–26. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Baugh, Albert C., and Cable, Thomas. 1978. A history of the English language. 3rd edn. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Bier wisch, Manfred. 1983. Semantische und konzeptuelle Repräsentation lexikalischer Einheiten. Untersuchungen zur Semantik, ed. by Ruzicka, R. and Motsch, W., 61–99. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bosch, Peter. 1984. Lexical learning, context dependence, and metaphor. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club.Google Scholar
Bosch, Peter. 1985. Context dependence and metaphor. The ubiquity of metaphor, ed. by Paprotté, Wolf and Dirven, René, 141–76. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Carston, Robyn. 1988. Implicature, explicature, and truth-theoretic semantics. Mental representation: The interface between language and reality, ed. by Kempson, Ruth M., 155–81. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Carston, Robyn. 1996. Metalinguistic negation and echoic use. Journal of Pragmatics 25. 309–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Copestake, Anne, and Briscoe, Ted. 1995. Semi-productive polysemy and sense extension. Journal of Semantics 12. 15–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ducrot, O. 1972. Dire et ne pas dire. Paris: Hermann.Google Scholar
Foolen, Ad. 1991. Metalinguistic negation and pragmatic ambiguity: Some comments on a proposal by Laurence Horn. Pragmatics 1. 217–37.Google Scholar
Gazdar, Gerald. 1979. Pragmatics: Implicature, presupposition, and logical form. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Geurts, Bart. 1995. Presupposing. Stuttgart: University of Stuttgart dissertation.Google Scholar
Geurts, Bart. 1996. Local satisfaction guaranteed. Linguistics and Philosophy 19. 259–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geurts, Bart. 1998. Presuppositions and anaphors in attitude contexts. Linguistics and Philosophy, to appear.Google Scholar
Geurts, Bart, and van der Sandt, Rob A. 1998. Domain restriction. Focus: linguistic, cognitive, and computational perspectives, ed. by Bosch, Peter and van der Sandt, Rob A. Cambridge University Press, to appear.Google Scholar
Grice, H. Paul. 1989. Studies in the way of words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Heim, Irene. 1983. On the projection problem for presuppositions. West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics 2. 114–26.Google Scholar
Herskovits, A. 1986. Language and spatial cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hopper, Paul J., and Traugott, Elizabeth C. 1993. Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Horn, Laurence R. 1972. On the semantic properties of logical operators in English. Los Angeles, CA: UCLA dissertation.Google Scholar
Horn, Laurence R. 1985. Metalinguistic negation and pragmatic ambiguity. Language 61. 121–74.Google Scholar
Horn, Laurence R. 1989. A natural history of negation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Horn, Laurence R. 1990. Showdown at truth-value gap: Burton-Roberts on presupposition. Journal of Linguistics 26. 483–503.Google Scholar
Horn, Laurence R. 1992. The said and the unsaid. Proceedings of SALT II, ed. by Barker, Chris and Dowty, David, 163–192. Columbus: Ohio State University.Google Scholar
Kamp, Hans. 1981. A theory of truth and semantic representation. Formal methods in the study of language, ed. by Groenendijk, Jeroen, Janssen, Theo, and Stokhof, Martin, 277–322. Amsterdam: Mathematical Centre Tracts 135.Google Scholar
Stokhof, Martin, and Reyle, Uwe. 1993. From discourse to logic. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar
Karttunen, Lauri. 1974. Presupposition and linguistic context. Theoretical Linguistics 1. 181–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kempson, Ruth M. 1986. Ambiguity and the semantics-pragmatics distinction. Meaning and interpretation, ed. by Travis, Charles, 77–103. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Koenig, J.-P. 1991. Scalar predicates and negation: Punctual semantics and interval interpretations. Chicago Linguistic Society 27(2). 331–44.Google Scholar
Ladd, D. Robert. 1980. The structure of intonational meaning. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Ladusaw, William A. 1996. Negation and polarity items. The handbook of contemporary semantic theory, ed. by Lappin, Shalom, 321–41. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, fire, and dangerous things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, David K. 1973. Counterfactuals. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Lewis, David K. 1979. Scorekeeping in a language game. Journal of Philosophical Logic 8. 339–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCawley, James D. 1991. Contrastive negation and metalinguistic negation. Chicago Linguistic Society 27 (2). 189–206.Google Scholar
Morgan, J. L. 1978. Two types of convention in indirect speech acts. Syntax and semantics, vol. 9: Pragmatics, ed. by Cole, Peter, 261–80. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Nunberg, Geoffrey. 1978. The pragmatics of reference. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club.Google Scholar
Nunberg, Geoffrey. 1979. The non-uniqueness of semantic solutions: Polysemy. Linguistics and Philosophy 3. 143–84.Google Scholar
Nunberg, Geoffrey. 1995. Transfers of meaning. Journal of Semantics 12. 109–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pusch, Luise F. 1975. Über den Unterschied zwischen aber und sondern oder die Kunst des Widersprechens. Syntaktische und semantische Studien zur Koordination, ed. by Bátori, István, Pusch, Luise F., Levin, Jurij L., Abraham, Werner, Bublitz, Wolfram, and von Roncador, Manfred, 45–62. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quine, W. V. O. 1951. Mathematical logic. Rev. edn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Quine, W. V. O. 1969. Ontological relativity and other essays. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Sadock, Jerrold. 1984. Whither radical pragmatics? Meaning, form, and use in context: linguistic applications, ed. by Schiffrin, Deborah, 139–49. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Sæbø, Kjell Johann. 1993. Anaphoric presuppositions, accommodation, and zero anaphora. Presupposition, ed. by Kamp, Hans, 135–92. University of Amsterdam: DYANA-2 Report R2.2.A, part 2.Google Scholar
Sag, Ivan. 1981. Formal semantics and extralinguistic content. Radical pragmatics, ed. by Cole, Peter, 273–94. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Sperber, Dan, and Wilson, Deirdre. 1986. Relevance: Communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Stalnaker, Robert C. 1973. Presuppositions. Journal of Philosophical Logic 2. 447–57.Google Scholar
Stalnaker, Robert C. 1974. Pragmatic presuppositions. Semantics and philosophy, ed. by Munitz, Milton K. and Unger, Peter K., 197–213. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Sweetser, Eve. 1990. From etymology to pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van der Sandt, Rob A. 1988. Context and presupposition. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Van der Sandt, Rob A. 1989. Presupposition and discourse structure. Semantics and contextual expression, ed. by Bartsch, Renate, Benthem, Johan van, and van, Peter Boas, Emde, 267–94. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Van der Sandt, Rob A. 1991. Denial. Chicago Linguistic Society 27(2):331-44.Google Scholar
Van der Sandt, Rob A. 1992. Presupposition projection as anaphora resolution. Journal of Semantics 9. 333–77.Google Scholar
Van der Sandt, Rob A. 1998. Denial and negation. Linguistics and Philosophy, to appear.Google Scholar
Van der Sandt, Rob A., and Geurts, Bart. 1991. Presupposition, anaphora, and lexical content. Text understanding in LILOG, ed. by Herzog, Otthein and Rollinger, Claus-Rainer, 259–96. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.Google Scholar
Wierzbicka, Anna. 1994. Semantic primitives across languages: A critical review. Semantic and lexical universais, ed. by Goddard, C. and Wierzbicka, A., 445–500. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Wilson, Deirdre, and Sperber, Dan. 1988. Representation and relevance. Mental representation: The interface between language and reality, ed. by Kempson, Ruth M., 133–53. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Zeevat, Henk. 1992. Presupposition and accommodation in update semantics. Journal of Semantics 9. 379–412.CrossRefGoogle Scholar