THE PRAGMATICS OF NEGATION
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.29038/2617-6696.2022.5.49.63Keywords:
negation, pragmatics, pragmatic universal, philosophers, linguists, psychologistsAbstract
In this article the consideration is given to the phenomenon of negation. Studies of negation have been in the field of view of logicians, philosophers, linguists and psychologists for centuries. This pragmatic universal, which is reflected in languages, albeit by different means – a syntactic and a morphosyntactic phenomenon that is studied interdisciplinary. Through this the multifacetedness and multifunctionality of negation belongs to such language categories that are always in the field of view of scientific circles of humanitarian sphere of knowledge. Despite the fact that a thorough analysis of negation began within the framework of formal logic, however later this pragmatic universal has become one of the fundamentals in various scientific fields of knowledge. It (negation) is also one of the most basic human concepts (meanings) and its presence is one of the criteria that reveals human nature and its expression in the humanitarian sphere of knowledge. Still, the discussions concerning this issue are of great value for understanding the functions of negation, and the analyses carried out in the following pages clearly and mainly gain arguments from the asymmetry hypothesis to explain phenomena about negatives’ meanings. That, the ability to deny is natural, which means a natural phenomenon. We analyze its various forms in the corpus and discourse of English in an interlinguistic perspective.
References
Anscombre, Jean-Claude, and Oswald Ducrot. 1983. L’argumentation dans la langue. Brussels: Mardaga.
Apothéloz, Denis, Pierre-Yves Brandt, and Gustavo Quiroz. 1993. “The Function of Negation in Argumentation”. Journal of Pragmatics, 19: 23–38. doi:10.1016/0378-2166(93)90068-Z
Aristotle. 1938. On Sophistical Refutations. Transl. by Edward S. Forster, Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Aristotle. 1939. Topica. Transl. by E. S. Forster, Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Bacha, Jacqueline, Ammar Azouzi, et Khaled Saddem (eds). 2011. La négation en discours. Facultés des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de Sousse et de Kairouan. Université de Sousse: Unité de recherche en syntaxe sémantique et pragmatique.
Bacri, Nicole and Bénédicte de Boysson-Bardies. 1977. “Portée de la négation et référenciation chez les enfants de 4 `a 10 ans”. L’année psychologique, 77 (1): 117–136. doi:10.3406/psy.1977.28182
Bally, Charles. 1932. Linguistique générale et linguistique francaise. Paris: Leroux.
Bardel, Camilla. 2000. La negazione nell’italiano degli sevesi. Sequence acquisizionali e influssi translinguistici. Études Romances de Lund.
Benveniste, Émile. 1966. Problémes de linguistique générale. Tome 1. Paris: Gallimard.
Benveniste, Émile. 1974. Problémes de linguistique générale. Tome 2. Paris: Gallimard.
Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad, and Edward Finegan. 1999. Longman grammar of spoken and written English. London: Longman.
Blutner, Reinhard. 2004. “Pragmatics and the Lexicon”. In Handbook of pragmatics, ed. by Laurence Horn and Gregory Ward, 488–514. Oxford: Blackwell.
Carston, Robyn. 1996. “Metalinguistic Negation and Echoic Use”. Journal of Pragmatics, 25: 309–330. doi:10.1016/0378-2166(94)00109-X
Chellas, Brian F. 1980. Modal Logic. An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511621192
Clark, Herbert H. 1974. “Semantics and Comprehension”. Current Trends in Linguistics, Linguistics and Adjacent Arts, 12: 1291–1428. Clark, Herbert H., and Eve V.
Clark. 1977. Psychology and language: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Javanovich.
Dahl, Ősten. 1979. “Typology of Sentence Negation”. Linguistics, 17: 79–106. doi:10.1515/ling.1979.17.1-2.79
de Swart, Henriette. 2010. Expression and Interpretation of Sentential Negation: An OT Typology. Dordrecht: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-90-481-3162-4
Dryer, Matthew S. 2011. “Position of negative morpheme with respect to subject, object, and verb”. In World Atlas of Language Structures Online, ed. by Matthew S. Dryer and Martin Haspelmath. Munich: Max Planck Digital Library.
Ducrot, Oswald. 1980. Les mots du discours. Paris: Éditions de minuit.
Ducrot, Oswald. 1984. “Esquisse d’une théorie polyphonique de l’enonciation”. In Le dire et le dit, 171–233. Paris: Seuil.
Fairclough, Norman. 1995. Media Discourse. London: Edward Arnold.
Fairclough, Norman. 2003. Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge.
Fauconnier, Gilles. 1979. “Implication Reversal in a Natural Language”. In Formal Semantics and Pragmatics for Natural Languages, ed. by F. Gunther and S. J. Schmidt, 289–301. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Fauconnier, Gilles. 1994. Mental Spaces. New York: Cambridge University Press. (1985 Cambridge: MIT Press.) doi:10.1017/CBO9780511624582
Frege, Gottlob. 1971 (1918). Écrits logiques et philosophiques. Paris: Seuil.
Gaatone, David. 1971. Étude descriptive du systéme de la négation en francais contemporain [Publication romaines et francaises, CXIV]. Genéve: Librairie Droz.
Giora, Rachel. 2006. “Anything Negatives can do Affirmatives can do Just as Well, Except for Some Metaphors”. Journal of Pragmatics, 38 (7): 981–1014. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2005.12.006
Givon, Talmy. 1978. “Negation in Language: Pragmatics, Function, Ontology”. In Syntax and Semantics 9: Pragmatics, ed. by Peter Cole, 69–112. New York: Academic Press.
Guillaume Gustave, Valin Roch (ed). 1973. Principes de linguistique théorique de Gustave Guillaume. Paris, Klincksieck, Québec: Presses de l’Univ. Laval, p. 17.
Haspelmath, Martin. 2006. “Against Markedness (and what to replace it with)”. Journal of Linguisticsm, 42: 25–70. doi:10.1017/S0022226705003683
Hegarty, Michael. 2016. Modality and Propositional Attitudes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781316084434
Heldner, Christina. 1981. La portée de la négation. Un examen de quelques facteurs sémantiques et textuels pertinents a sa détermination dans des énoncés authentiques. Stockholm: Norstedts tryckeri AB.
Hidalgo-Downing, Laura. 2000. Negation, Text Worlds, and Discourse: The Pragmatics of Fiction. Stamford US: Ablex Publishing Company.
Horn, Laurence R. 1989. A Natural History of Negation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Jespersen, Otto. 1917. Negation in English and Other Languages. Copenhagen: A. F. Host and Son.
Katz, J. J. 1979. “A Solution to the Projection Problem for Presupposition”. In Syntax and semantics: Presupposition, Vol. 11, ed. by C.-K. Oh, 91–126. London: Academic Press.
Katz, Jerrold. 1972. Semantic Theory. New York: Harper and Row.
Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine. 1999. Les interactions verbales, 3 tomes. Paris: Armand Colin.
Kratzer, Angelica. 1991. “Modality”. In Semantics – An International Handbook of Contemporary Research, ed. by Arnim von Stechow and D. Wunderlich, 639–650. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter.
Kronning, Hans. 2006. “Polyfoni, modalitet och evidentialitet. Om epistemiska uttryck i franskan, särskilt epistemisk konditionalis”. In Sproglig polyfoni. Tekster om Bachtin and ScaPoLine, ed. by Rita Therkelsen, Nina Muller Andersen, and Henning Nolke, 301–324. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag.
Larrivée, Pierre, and Laurent Perrin. 2010. “Voix et point de vue de la négation”. In La question polyphonique ou dialogique en sciences du langage, ed. by Marion Colas-Blaise, Laurent Perrin, and André Petitjean, 175–199. Metz: Université Paul Verlaine-Metz.
Larrivée, Pierre. 2001. L’interprétation des phrases négatives: portée et foyer des négations en francais. Champs linguistiques. Brussels: Duculot.
Leech, Geoffrey N. 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.
Lewkowicz, Sergio, and Thierry Bokanowski. 2011. “On Freud’s “Constructions in Analysis”. In (1937) Contemporary Freud: Turning Points & Critical Issues, ed. by Georges Pragier. London: Karnac Books.
Maingueneau, Dominique. 2016. Analyser les textes de communication. Paris: Armand Collin.
Martin, Robert. 1983. Pour une logique du sens. Linguistique nouvelle. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Miestamo, Matti. 2005. Standard Negation. The Negation of Declarative Verbal Main Clauses in a Typological Perspective [Empirical Approaches to Language Typology 31]. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. pp. xiii, 490.
Moeschler Jacques. 2013a. “How ‘Logical’ are Logical Words? Negation and its Descriptive vs. Metalinguistic Uses”. In Nonveridicality, Evaluation and Coherence Relations, ed. by M. Taboada and R. Trnavac, 76–110. Leiden: Brill.
Moeschler, Jacques. 1982. Dire et contredire. Pragmatique de la négation et acte de réfutation dans la conversation. Berne : Peter Lang, coll. “Processus discursifs.”
Moeschler, Jacques. 1997. “La négation comme expression procédurale”. In Negation and Polarity. Syntax and Semantics, ed. by D. Forget, P. Hirschbühler, F. Martineau, and M-L. Rivero, 231–249. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi:10.1075/cilt.155.12moe
Moeschler, Jacques. 2013b. “Négation, portée et distinction négation descriptive/métalinguistique”. In La linguistique de la contradiction, ed. by Jacques François, Pierre Larrivée, Dominique Legallois, et Franck Neveu, 163–179. Berne: Peter Lang.
Muller, Claude. 1991. La negation en francais. Syntaxe, sémantique et éléments de comparaison avec les autres langues romanes. Genéve: Libraire Droz.
Neveu, Franck, Jacques Francois, Pierre Larrivée, and Dominique Legallois (eds). 2013. La linguistique de la contradiction. GRAMM-R. Studies of French Linguistics. Berne: Peter Lang. doi:10.3726/978-3-0352-6306-0
Nolke, Henning. 1993. Le regard du locuteur. Pour une linguistique des traces énonciatives. Paris: Kim?.
Nolke, Henning. 2004. “Connecteurs pragmatiques: l’apport de quelques connecteurs a la structure polyphonique”. Le Francais Moderne, 74 (1): 32–42.
Postal, Paul. 2004. “A Remark on English Double Negatives”. In Syntax, Lexis and Lexicon-Grammar. Papers in honor of Maurice Gross, ed. by Chrsitian Leclére, Eric Laporte, Mireille Piot, and Max Silberstein, 497–508. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi:10.1075/lis.24.39pos
Roitman, Malin. 2006. “Polyphonie argumentative: étude de la négation dans des éditoriaux du Figaro, de Libération et du Monde”. PhD diss., Stockholm: University of Stockholm. Mode of access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-1053
Roitman, Malin. 2015. “Refutations of the Other’s Discourse. A Study of the Traditional Presidential Debate: Chirac/Jospin (1995) vs Sarkozy/Royal (2007)”. Argumentation. Springer, 29 (1): 19–32. doi:10.1007/s10503-014-9332-4
Roulet, Eddy, Laurent Filliettaz and Anne Grobet. 2001. (eds.) Un modéle et un instrument d’analyse de l’organisation du discours. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Russell, Bertrand. 1905. “On denoting”. Mind, 14: 479–493. Oxford: Blackwell. doi:10.1093/mind/XIV.4.479
Russon, John Edward. 1993. “Hegel’s Phenomenology of Reason and Dualism”. Southern Journal of Philosophy, 31 (1): 71–96. doi:10.1111/j.2041-6962.1993.tb00670.x
Sanell, Anna. 2005. Parcours acquisitionnel de la négation en francais L2 des chez apprenants suédophones. Thése de doctorat. Stockholm University.
Searle, John R. 1969. Speech Acts. An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139173438
Segerberg, Krister. 1971. An Essay in Classical Modal Logic, Vol. 1–3. Uppsala University: Uppsala Philosophical Studies.
Tottie, Gunnel. 1991. Negation in English Speech and Writing: A Study in Variation. San Diego: Academic Press, Print.
Wierzbicka, Anna. 1996. Semantics: Primes and Universals: Primes and Universals. New York: Oxford University Press.
Windisch, Uli. 1987. Le K.O. verbal, la communication conflictuelle. Lausanne: l’ége d’Homme.
