Studies on metarepresentation in linguistics and pragmatics (Wilson 2012 for a synthesis) only superficially addressed the issue of the relationship between negation and metarepresentation (Carston 1996 and 2002 for an exception). In another side, works on metalinguistic negation (Horn 1985, 1989) do not say anything on their metarepresentational properties.
In this talk, I will make an explicit link between metarepresentational properties and metalinguistic usages of negation, by showing how negation is metarepresentational in its usage contexts and representational in its contextual effects. I will show that three main uses of negation must be distinguished: one descriptive usage, representational, and two metalinguistic ones, both metarepresentational and representational. Finally, I will support the hypothesis that negation needs metalinguistic usages to scope over pragmatic implicit meanings, like presupposition and conversational implicatures. Only metalinguistic usages of negation can affect these contents.
The consequence of this analysis is not trivial and gives rise to an interesting claim: if an utterance U implicates or presupposes a proposition form Q, then only metalinguistic negation can defeat Q. When negation is descriptive, either Q is conserved (presupposition), or Q is out of the scope of negation (implicature).
The chapter will give a convergent set of arguments in favour of the distinction between the afforded mentioned three types of negation: entailment, scope of negation, discourse relations, connectives, and contextual effects. Moreover, it will be claimed that formal, semantic and discourse properties of the usages of negation are the results of contextual effects. Hence, I strongly support an approach of the semantics and pragmatics of negation that does not give pragmatics a last resort status in the semantics-pragmatics interface, and makes predictions on the contextual dependency of the interpretation of negation (contrary to the results given in Noh et al. 2013). A recent experiment on descriptive and metalinguistic uses of negation (cf. Blochowiak and Grisot, in preparation), will de presented.
Blochowiak, J. & C. Grisot. In preparation. “Cognitive processing of descriptive and metalinguistic negation. How extralinguistic contextual clues ease the treatment in both types of negation”.
Carston R. (1996), “Metalinguistic negation and echoic use”, Journal of Pragmatics 25, 309- 330.
Carston R. (2002), Thoughts and Utterances, Oxford, Blackwell.
Horn L.R. (1985), “Metalinguistic negation and pragmatic ambiguity”, Language 61/1, 121-174.
Horn L.R. (1989), A Natural History of Negation, Chicago, The Chicago University Press.
Moeschler J. (2010), “Negation, scope and the descriptive/metalinguistic distinction », Generative Grammar in Geneva 6, 29-48.
Moeschler J. (2013), “How much ‘logical’ are logical words? Negation and its descriptive vs. metalinguistic uses”, in Taboada M. & Trnavac R. (eds.), Nonveridicality, Evaluation and Coherence Relations, Leiden, Brill, 76-110.
Noh E.-J., Choo H., Koh S. (2013), “Processing metalinguistic negation: Evidence from eye-tracking experiments”, Journal of Pragmatics 57, 1-18.
Wilson D. (2012), “Metarepresentation in linguistic communication”, in Wilson D. & Sperber D., Meaning and Relevance, Cambridge, CUP, chapter 11, 230-58.