Verona lectures 2014

Crash courses on the Pragmatics of negation

General description

Negation is a linguistic universal, implying syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties. This cash course will be focused on the pragmatics of negation. Pragmatics has as a main goal to describe ans explain how utterances are interpreted in contexts, and is mainly concerned by issues as presuppositions and implicatures, that is, meaning which are traditionally defined as non-truth-conditional.

In this class, some of the classical issues in the semantics and pragmatics of negation will be discussed, as the descriptive and metalinguistic distinction, the semantic and pragmatic properties of quantifiers and the contexts licensing descriptive and metalinguistic negation.

Course 1: Negation, presupposition and implicature

Tuesday 4 November, 17h20-18h50, room 1.1

This course is devoted to the relation between negation, presupposition and implicature. The first issue has to explain how negation is connected to presupposition, and what are the implications of a logical definition of presupposition. The presupposition issue introduces the descriptive vs. metalinguistic uses of negation, that is, a pragmatic distinction compatible with a truth-conditional description of negation. The implicature issue will show how implicit meaning is defined as a non-truth-conditional meaning, and how negative utterances are described as regards to implicatures. Finally, a general truth-conditional definition of presupposition and implicature will be offered.

Course 2: The logical square and the meaning of positive and negative particulars

Thursday 6 November, 14h-15h30, room 1.3

One puzzle in natural languages is the absence of lexicalization of negative particulars (not all, some…not), as regards to others logical quantifiers (all, some, none). This class is devoted to the presentation of the standard logical and pragmatic analysis of quantifiers via the Aristotelian logical square (Horn 1989) and the explanation of the absence of lexicalization for negative particulars. An alternative analysis will be proposed, implying a truth-conditional pragmatic analysis for quantifiers, at the level of explicit vs. implicit meanings. A precise description of the semantics and pragmatics of particulars (some, some not) will be proposed, using a standard Boolean semantics.

Course 3: The context of negative utterances

Friday 7 November 2014, 15h40-17h10, room 1.3

Descriptive and metalinguistic negations do not occur within the same context. In this class I will propose some criteria allowing the licensing of descriptive and metalinguistic negation (negation of presuppositions and implicatures). These criteria are entailment, scope, connectives, discourse relations, contextual assumptions and contextual effects. These criteria are convergent and predictors for the computation of different pragmatic meanings of negative utterances.

A general discussion meeting will take place on Friday, 17h30-18h30, Saletta riunioni, terzo piano, Polo Zanotto.

References

Horn L. (1989), A Natural History of Negation, Chicago, The University of Chicago press.

Moeschler J. (2007), « Why are there no negative particulars? Horn’s conjecture revisited », Generative Grammar in Geneva 5, 1-13.

Moeschler J. (2007), « Introduction to pragmatics », in Rajman M. (ed.), Language and Speech Engineering, Lausanne, EPFL Press, 51-68.

Moeschler J. (2007), « Introduction to semantics », in Rajman M. (ed.), Language and Speech Engineering, Lausanne, EPFL Press, 27-49.

Moeschler J. (2010), « Negation, scope and the descriptive/metalinguistic distinction », Generative Grammar in Geneva 6, 29-48.

Moeschler J. (2012), « Conversational and conventional implicatures », in Schmidt H.J. (ed.), Cognitive Pragmatics, Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, 407-434.

Moeschler J. (2013), « How ‘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.

Moeschler J. (2013), « Is a speaker-based pragmatics possible? Or how can a hearer infer a speaker’s commitment? », Journal of Pragmatics 43, 84-97.

Reboul A. & Moeschler J. (2012), La pragmatica oggi, Fasano, Schiena Editore.