Metalinguistic negation from an informational perspective

Abstract

This paper revisits the definition of metalinguistic negation (MLN) illustrated by e.g. They don't have kids, they have children. A new definition is proposed that rests on two properties. The first is that MLN is a corrective speech-act. The second is that the sentence used to perform the speech-act has a paradoxical Information Structure: it is discourse-old material, along with the corrected a segment that is however treated as discourse-new by virtue of being focused and contrasted to the correcting segment. These properties are used to explain established features of MLN. MLN's speech-act status accounts for the distinctive behaviour of relevant connectives. The paradoxical Information Structure distinguishes MLN from other uses of negation, relates it to other corrective constructions and metalinguistic phenomena (e.g. in conditionals and questions) and accounts for the alleged marked status of metalinguistic configurations. How MLN can be mapped by a cartographic approach is speculated upon.

Comparing corrective constructions: Contrastive negation in parallel and monolingual data

“…A review of the literature on metalinguistic negation is beyond the scope and focus of this paper (but see e.g. Carston 1996;Geurts 1998;Pitts 2011;Moeschler 2015;Larrivée 2018). Here, I simply follow Carston (1996), who argues that negation is truth-functional even when metalinguistic, but the relevant truth value pertains to a representation.…”

Interpreting high negation in Negative Interrogatives: the role of the Other

“…This accounts for the bias in favor of the positive proposition, since the negation is assumed to interact with the speech-acts, although such an interaction seems stipulative, as speech-acts never empirically come under the scope of sentential negation, not even metalinguistic negation (Larrivée, 2018). 2 Moreover, they cannot easily explain why the properties of NI arise in total questions rather than in all interrogatives.…”

“…Clausal negation can question the form of the subject 'Kids' don't have fears, 'children' have fears. But as pointed out byLarrivée (2018), it cannot suggest that the interrogative is to be corrected in favor of an assertion. A sequence such as Isn't Abi beautiful?…”

The Meaning of Teachers’ Negations in Hong Kong Classrooms Interpreted from their Co-occurring Gestures

“…(3) Paul is not big, he is gigantic (Nølke, 2017, p.152) Positively worded alternatives are not always necessary with metalinguistic negations (see example (4)). Other scholars (Larrivée, 2018;Moeschler, 2015) defend an exclusive category for metalinguistic negations, as these have the specific function of correcting previously introduced content with a positive outcome (while polemic and descriptive negations have negative outcomes) (Larrivée, 2018).…”