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Metalinguistic Negation and Pragmatic Ambiguity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Laurence R. Horn
Laurence R. Horn*
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Abstract

When ‘marked’ or ‘external’ negation has not been treated as an additional semantic operator alongside the straightforward truth-functional, presupposition-preserving ordinary (‘internal‘) negation, it has been collapsed with internal negation into a unified general logical operator on propositions. Neither of these approaches does justice to the differences and kinships between and within the two principal varieties of negation in natural language. Marked negation is not reducible to a truth-functional one-place connective with the familiar truth-table for negation, nor is it definable as a separate logical operator; it represents, rather, a metalinguistic device for registering objection to a previous utterance (not proposition) on any grounds whatever, including the way it was pronounced.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 61 , Issue 1 , March 1985, pp. 121 - 174
Copyright
Copyright © 1985 by Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

Parts of this paper were presented in a different form at the 1982 summer and winter meetings of the Linguistic Society of America, and at talks at Columbia and Cornell earlier in the same year. The seeds for the major thesis germinated at the July 1979 Colloquium on the Possibilities and Limitations of Pragmatics at Urbino, Italy, and subsequently developed through courses and seminars at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Yale. The members of these audiences, along with those who read and commented on earlier versions, are hereby collectively thanked, and of course absolved of all blame for the ways I may have used (and misused) their suggestions. I would like to single out for special thanks Barbara Abbott, Jay Atlas, Samuel Bayer, Seungja Choi, Benoît de Cornulier, Robin Cooper, David Dowty, Georgia Green, Anne Malcolm, Ewan Klein, William Lycan, David Odden, Jerry Sadock, Dennis Stampe, and Deirdre Wilson. Their contributions were not important—they were invaluable.

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