Metalinguistic Negation and Pragmatic Ambiguity

Linguistic Society of America
Metalinguistic Negation and Pragmatic Ambiguity Author(s): Laurence R. Horn Source: Language, Vol. 61, No. 1 (Mar., 1985), pp. 121-174 Published by: Linguistic Society of America Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/413423 Accessed: 25/01/2010 09:46
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METALINGUISTIC NEGATION AND PRAGMATIC AMBIGUITY

LAURENCE R. HORN
Yale University
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.* INTRODUCTION
So-called 'external' or 'marked' negation is often exemplified by the reading of The King of France is not bald which is forced by the continuation ... because there is no King of France and which is true if France is a republic; by contrast, the 'internal' reading is either false or lacks truth value. The traditional account of external negation involves the recognition of a semantic ambiguity; this position is adopted, in somewhat different ways, by Frege 1892, by Russell 1905, by Karttunen & Peters 1979, and by proponents of three-valued logics. However, the major recent trend among philosophers and linguists represented by Atlas 1974, 1977, 1981, by Kempson 1975, and by Gazdar 1979a,b, has been to reject this putative ambiguity (along with the existence of truth-value gaps and semantic presuppositions) and to assimilate all instances of natural language negation to a single truth-functional operator. Both views contain much insight and some truth, yet both are seriously flawed. While two distinct uses of natural language negation must indeed be admitted, the marked use must be treated not as a truth-functional or semantic operator on propositions, but rather as a device for objecting to a previous utterance on any grounds whatever-including its conventional or conversational implicata, its morphology, its style or register, or its phonetic realization. In this paper, conceived as a more explicit formulation of some ideas inherent in Ducrot 1972, 1973, Grice 1967, Wilson 1975, and others, and buttressed by
* 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, Benoit 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. 121
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LANGUAGE, VOLUME 61, NUMBER 1 (1985)
a variety of linguistic data correlatingwith the two uses of negation, I seek to focus on the descriptive/metalinguistic dichotomy as an instance of pragmatic ambiguity-a built-in duality of use wherein the descriptive meaning of negation motivates its extended function. I will discuss the relation of metalinsemantics, and will argue that the tradiguistic negation to truth-conditional tional identificationof external negationwith the formulaIt is not true that ... is misleadingat best. I also attemptto show that other logical operators(and, uses of their own; or, if-then, and wH-binding) display extended metalinguistic and I cast furtherdoubt on theories which treat naturallanguagenegation as either semanticallyambiguousor invariablytruth-functional. The outline of the paper is as follows. In ?1, some of the more influential
accounts of negation are summarized and discussed: the
of Russell, Strawson, and the three-valuedlogicians in ?1.1; the MONOGUIST approachof Atlas, Kempson, and Gazdarin ?1.2; and the NEO-AMBIGUIST position of Karttunen& Peters in ?1.3. In ?2, I present evidence to supportthe position that negationmust be taken as pragmatically ambiguous,with marked negation as an extended metalinguisticuse of a basically truth-functional operator. In ?2.1, I arguethat external, presupposition-canceling negationis part of a wider phenomenoncharacterizedas the use of negationto signalthe speaker's unwillingnessto assert a given propositionin a given way-or, more generally, the speaker'sobjectionto the content or form (phonetic,morphological, syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic)associated with a given utterance. In ?2.2, I discuss the two uses of negation (descriptiveand metalinguistic)in terms of what they generally negate: truth (of a proposition) vs. assertability (of an utterance). In ?2.3, I focus on a characteristicuse of metalinguisticnegation as a means of removingthe upper-bounding implicatureassociated with scalar predications(e.g. It isn't WARM, it's HOT); in ?2.4, I examine one correlate of the descriptive/metalinguistic dichotomy for English negation-the ability of not descriptive (but metalinguistic)negation to incorporate prefixally. The question of the interplay of truth, negation, and implicatureis addressed in ?2.5, where I try to show that markednegationcannotbe semanticallyanalysed in terms of truth; attempts in this direction, where external negation is taken
as approximately It is not TRUEthat for some semantic predicate TRUE, founder
AMBIGUIST approach
on the distinction between the semantic notion of truth and the distributional behavior of the word true in ordinarylanguage. In ?3, I briefly discuss the extent to which other standardlogical connectives and variable-binding operators may be seen as pragmatically ambiguous(like between negation) descriptive and metalinguisticuses. In ?4, I return to an examinationof other recent approachesto the unity or duality of naturallanguage negation which are closer in spirit to the view defended in ?2: in ?4.1, the monoguist positions of Allwood 1972, of Kempson, and of Atlas, and the neo-monoguist(or neo-ambiguist)theories of Bergmann, 1977, 1981, of Karttunen & Peters, and of Lehrer & Lehrer 1982;in ?4.2, the analysis of French negation in terms of a distinctionbetween 'negationdescriptive'and 'negation metalinguistique'(or 'polemique')in work by Ducrot and his colleagues; and in ?4.3, the treatmentof negation advanced by Wilson, in many ways akin to
123
that urged here. A summaryof my findings, with a brief cross-linguisticexcursus, is given in ?5.
The Appendixpresents an examinationof two types of but clauses in English (with parallels in Spanish, German, and French) which interact significantly with the two uses of negationdistinguishedin the body of the paper. Following Anscombre & Ducrot 1977, I attempt to show that metalinguisticnegation is compatiblewith only one of these subspecies of but clauses.
EXTERNAL NEGATION: SOME TRADITIONAL ACCOUNTS
1.1. THE AMBIGUIST LINE. For most recent proponents-and
opponents-of
the claim that naturallanguagenegationis semanticallyambiguous,the causal chain stretches back at least to Frege and Russell. Aristotleand the Stoics may have held analogous views (cf. Bergmann 1977:65,Atlas 1981:125),but the evidence is unclear.Russell (485)formulatedthe essential puzzle with his characteristic style:
'By the law of the excluded middle, either "A is B" or "A is not B" must be true. Hence either "the present king of Franceis bald" or "the presentkingof Franceis not bald" must be true. Yet if we enumeratedthe things that are bald and the things that are not bald, we shouldnot find the kingof Franceon eitherlist. Hegelians,who love a synthesis,will probably conclude that he wears a wig.'
This puzzle, Russell maintained,should be unraveledby the eliminationof definite descriptions (e.g. the present king of France) from logical form, with the result that sentences like 1-2 are not of subject-predicateform, theirsyntax notwithstanding: (1) The present king of France is bald. (1') 3x (Kx & Vy[Ky-,y=x] & Bx) (2) The present king of France is not bald. (2') 3x (Kx & Vy[Ky-y=x] & -Bx) (2")-3x (Kx & Vy[Ky->y=x] & Bx) If ex. 1 is unpacked into an existentially quantifiedconjunction, as in 1', its normal (or 'primary')negation consists in attachingthe negative operator to the third conjunct, as shown in 2'. This INTERNALLY negated sentence was for Russell 'simply false' if there was no French king (or more than one of them). However, he acknowledged,there is a readingof 2 with 'secondary' negation which is true, given that France is a republic. It is this readingwhich requires to the entire logical form 1', resulting attachingthe negation sign EXTERNALLY in 2"above. Despite the importanceof Russell's analysis, the treatmentof negation as semantically ambiguous came to be linked historicallywith the treatmentof logical (or semantic) presuppositionin anti-Russelliantheories of definite descriptions.While the relationof presuppositionobtainingbetween propositions can be tracedback to Peter of Spain, whose 12thcenturyTreatiseon exponibles the modernsense (cf. Mulemployed the verbpraesupponerein approximately it was who introduced modern lally 1945), Frege philosophersto the problems of presuppositionand referencefailurefor names and descriptions.In his classic paper on sense and reference, Frege (1892:40)arguedthat both 3a and its
(ordinary) negation 3b PRESUPPOSE (voraussetzen) that the name Kepler des-
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LANGUAGE,VOLUME61, NUMBER 1 (1985)
ignates something: (3) a. Kepler died in misery. b. Kepler did not die in misery. c. Keplerdid not die in misery, or the nameKeplerhas no reference. To detach this presupposition,Frege claimed, the negation of 3a would have had to be not 3b, but 3c. While he did not pursue this possibility, it should be noted that Frege seems to have prefiguredthe later emergence of a presupposition-cancelingexternal negation whose truth conditions are equivalentto those of disjunctionslike 3c. It was, however, with Strawson's re-introductionof neo-Fregean presuppositions, and the truth-valuegaps resultingfrom their non-satisfaction,that the semantic ambiguityof negation came into its heyday. For Strawson 1950, someone who uttered ex. 1 did commit himself to the existence of a (unique) French king, but did not ASSERT(nor does his statementENTAIL) the existential propositionthat there is a king of France. In case this existential proposition failed, Strawson maintained,ex. 1 would be judged neither true nor false. A statement was indeed made under such circumstances(pace Frege 1892), but the question of its truth value 'fails to arise'. While Strawson himself was skeptical of using any version of formal logic to express his intuitionsabout truthand meaningin naturallanguage,'logicians before him like Lukasiewicz 1930, Kleene 1938, and Bochvar 1939-and philosophers and linguists since, including Smiley 1960, van Fraassen 1966, Keenan 1971, Herzberger1973, Katz 1977, and Martin1979, 1981-have proposed varieties of three-valuedlogics in which truth-valuegaps arise, i.e. in which meaningfuldeclarativestatements can be made which in at least some contexts are assigned neither of the classical values T or F. It is generallyaccepted withinthese models that ordinarynegationpreserves if andonly if a statementis non-bivalent(neithertruenorfalse) (non-)bivalence: in a given context, its ordinarynegationwill likewise be non-bivalent.This is shown in the second column of Table 1, the standardtruthtable for negation, where N stands for the neuter, non-bivalent,or non-designatedvalue. But if the three-valuedlogician agrees with Strawsonthat ex. 1 and its ordinarynegation 2-read as in 2', as assertinghirsutenessof the French monarch-share non-bivalencewhen their shared existential presuppositionfails,2 what of the
The last sentence of Strawson'smanifestoreads: 'Neither Aristoteliannor Russellianrules give the exact logic of any expression of ordinarylanguage;for ordinarylanguagehas no exact logic.' Kempson(1975:86)has pointedout the irony of this conclusion, which containsa definite In Strawson'slaterwork, only descripdescriptionwithoutinducingan existentialpresupposition. tions in subjectpositioninducepresuppositions (andincurtruth-value gaps when referencefails). 2 Horn 1972 is a somewhat the of the failure that presupposition uniqueness (Chap. 1) argues differentmatter;as noted there, the externalnegationoperatorwhich can be used to cancel existence (as we have seen) cannot easily cancel uniqueness: (a) ?*Theking of France isn't bald-there are two kings of France. senators. senatoris bald-there are two California (b) ?*It is not the case that the California will such matters Hawkins reference of definite the This probleminvolves 1978); (cf. pragmatics not be addressedhere.
1
AMBIGUITY METALINGUISTIC NEGATIONAND PRAGMATIC

, _ internal, choice, primary negation
125
P T F N
-P F T N
P-external, F T T
exclusion, secondarynegation
TABLE1.
reading specified by Russell's 2", which is apparently true in such a context? This is the sense in which we can say the following: (4) The king of France isn't bald-there ISN'T any king of France. One possibility is to assume a second negation operator which is assigned the truth values shown in the third column of Table 1. The traditional labels for the two negations thus distinguished are INTERNALand EXTERNAL,although other terms (as shown) have been employed. Alternatively, some presuppositionalists have held that negation is not in effect LEXICALLY ambiguous between the two senses depicted in Table 1, but SCOPALLY ambiguous as to its position in logical syntax (as it was within Russell's non-presuppositional two-valued logic). It has often been observed that the external reading of negation is more natural or accessible when the form of the negative statement is not as in 2-even when fleshed out in the manner of 4-but rather as in the following: (5) It is not true that the king of France is bald. (6) It is not the case that the king of France is bald. Arguing from this observation, Smiley, Herzberger, and others have suggested that we first introduce a one-place connective t, on the model of the BochvarFrege horizontal, to be interpreted as 'It is true that ...' Such a connective will always yield a bivalent truth value for t(P), given any meaningful statement (bivalent or non-bivalent) P. Now, while it may or may not be FALSE that the king of France is bald when France has no king, it is certainly NOT TRUE that the (non-existent) king is bald. Thus a negation outside the scope of the truth operator will always yield the opposite bivalent value of that assigned to t(P), as shown in Table 2. P
T
t(P)
T
-t(P)
F
F
N
F
F
TABLE 2.
T
T
We thus obtain the assignments we had for the external negation operator defined above; note the identity between the rightmost columns in Tables 1 and 2. Indeed, as Keenan and others have observed, we could now define a derived external negation operator as in 7, rather than taking P to be a primitive of the logic: (7) P =df ~t(P)
126
However the differences between these approachesare to be resolved, the existence of markednegative statementswhich are true when their affirmative counterpartsare neithertrue nor false has led proponentsof semantic presupposition to conclude that naturallanguage negation must be represented as of a single surface operator ambiguous,either by allowingdual interpretations or by providingdual scope possibilitiesfor negationin logical form. A systematic ambiguityfor negation figures crucially in ALL theories which admit semantic presuppositions-but (as Russell illustrated) not ONLY in these. As Thomason 1973 has observed, unless negation is treated as semanticallyambiguous, 'it's not clear that the semantic notion of presuppositioncan be defended at all'.3 The ambiguistposition on negation has been supportedrecently by Martin 1979, 1981-who acknowledges, in the course of his defense of semantic presupposition (1979:43),that know and other factives may have to be taken as semanticallyambiguous:
of course, the multiplication of senses beyond necessity is undesirable... 'Methodologically, but a few such ambiguities,especially that of negation,seem perfectlyreasonable.'
1.2. THEMONOGUIST LINE. The chief difficulty for the ambiguist view of ne-
gation sketched above is that it is by no means obvious, nor is it easily demonstrable, that negative sentences like 2 ARE semanticallyambiguous.Furthermore, as pointed out by Atlas 1974, the periphrasticconstructionsof 5-6 do not clearly disambiguate2 in favor of the presupposition-free'external' reading,except within a readilydefinablesubset of philosophersand linguists. Withinthe last decade, a countervailingconsensus in opposition to the ambiguistline has emergedfromthe work of Allwood, of Atlas, of Kempson 1975, of Boer & Lycan 1976, and of Gazdar.WhereRussell struggledwith diligence and care to untie the Gordianknot constructedby the king of France, these monoguists-wielding Occam's razor like a samuraisword-seek to sever it with one blow; for them, negationis simply not ambiguous,in either meaning or scope. The burdenof proof is clearlyon the ambiguist(as the defensive tone of Martin'spassage seems to concede); like other abstractentities, senses must not be multipliedbeyond necessity. Grice(1978:118-19)calls this the 'Modified Occam's Razor principle', and Ziff (1960:44)advances the same doctrine as 'Occam's eraser'. It is, moreover, exceptionallydifficultto PROVE that the presupposition-carinternal and the external understandrying understanding presupposition-free of 2 are that the former ing semanticallydistinct, given unilaterallyentails the latter:if the existent king of France is non-bald,it is certainlynot the case that the present king of France is bald. What the ambiguistmust demonstratebetween internal and external readings is a PRIVATIVE ambiguity, of the sort
3 The ambiguist/monoguist oppositioncomes from Wertheimer1972, who applies the terms to two rival theories of the semanticsof modals (cf. ?2.1 below). The statementin the text is a bit oversimplified,since van Fraassen (1966 and subsequentwork) has elaborateda theory of 'supervaluations'in which logical presuppositionis not defined in terms of the internalnegation of negation.Nevertheless, van Fraassen operator,and does not cruciallydependon the ambiguity does figurein the ranksof the ambiguists(cf. Martin1981for relateddiscussion).
NEGATIONAND PRAGMATIC AMBIGUITY METALINGUISTIC
127
claimed to hold for such examples as these: familiaris canis familaris, (8) a. I just bought a new dog.occ-canis canis familiaris, male of them is married. b. and Kim Lee are married .Each They are marriedto each other. Yet, as Zwicky & Sadock 1975have shown, it is just such ambiguitieswhich are the hardest to substantiateby linguistictests.4 For the linguist,a particularly tellingargument againstthe ambiguistposition is the fact (noted by Gazdar 1979a:65-6) that no naturallanguage seems to employ two distinct negative operators which function like the two logical operatorsin Table 1.5This is especially strikingwhen one considers the many instances in which a languagedoes contain two or more negative markers.In particular,as exemplified in Table 3, many languagesdraw an opposition beUNMARKED NEGATION MARKED (EMPHATIC) NEGATION
Ancient Greek
Modern Greek Latin
ou
6en (< ou6en) non
me
mi ne
Modem Irish
Estonian Tagalog
nach
ei hindi TABLE3.
gan
mitte huwag
it is just thattheirambiguity 4 I do not meanto implythatcases like 8a-b are not trulyambiguous; which (if any) is difficultto prove via the standardelliptical 'identity of sense' transformations block 'crossed readings'in the case of non-privative ambiguities: (a) Tracy left a deposit at the bank, and so did Lee. (b) Ralph saw her duck, {andI did too / but I didn't}. As Zwicky & Sadock note, the existence of crossed readingsin cases of privative ambiguities cannot in principlebe determined,since the moreinclusiveunderstanding will always be available (Atlas 1977to the contrarynotwithstanding): (c) Ron and Nancy are married,and so are Dick and Jimmy. (d) Fido is a dog, and so is Queenie. Thus, contraryto the claims of Atlas 1977and Kempson (1975:99-100),the acceptabilityof (e) has no bearingon the purported ambiguityof negation: The of not France is (e) bald, and neitheris the queen of England. king Here both conjunctspermitthe more inclusive 'external'understanding (cf. Horn 1984for related discussion). Martin(1981:23-6)notes that the semanticambiguity test classicallyemployedby philosophers is based on whethera given sentence can be judged simultaneously true and false relative to the same possible world, context, or state of affairs(cf. Quine 1960:27on the ambiguityof light; cf. also Kempson 1982). This criterionis rejected by Zwicky & Sadock for reasons Martinfinds true and insufficient;in any event, such privativeambiguitiesas 8b do come out simultaneously false with respect to the state of affairsdescribedin the recent country song title, 'When you're married,but not to each other'. And in the world of 1905 or today, Russell's classic negative sentence 2 may well be judged simultaneously TRUE and-depending on one's semanticpersuasions-either FALSE or non-bivalent (i.e. not true, in any case). The force of the objectionby Atlas and others to an ambiguousnegation operatoris thus weakened, coming to rest finally on the of parsimony, desideratum ratherthanon any specificempirical claimabout generalmetatheoretical naturallanguageambiguity. 5 Some to this claim will be discussed below. apparentcounter-examples
128
tween an unmarkeddeclarative negation and a marked form (often labeled 'emphatic') which is restricted to embedded non-finiteand/or non-indicative contexts, frequentlyco-occurringwith subjunctivemood.6 In French, negation can be markedin at least half a dozen morphologically andthe semanticcontext distinctways, dependingon the syntacticenvironment (cf. Gaatone 1971, Heldner 1981):
(9) (ne) ... paslpointlaucunlpersonnelrienljamais non (pas) + ADV
Swahili similarlycontains several instances of suppletiveand redundantmarking for negation:

(10) ni-na-ku-pend-a 'I love you' tu-na-ku-pend-a vs. si-ku-pend-i
INEG I-PRES-yOUsg-love-INDIC I
'I don't love you' vs. ha-tu-ku-pend-i

NEG -
'we love you' 'we don't love you' Languages, then, may utilize morphologically differentiated negative forms for syntactic, semantic, or even arbitrary reasons, but-significantly-never
to mark the one distinction which Russell and the three-valued ambiguists would lead us to expect. It might be held that the external reading of negation need not display a
separate morphological coding, since it will be associated with the occurrence
of true within its scope, as suggested in the earlierdiscussion (cf. ex. 7). Thus Karttunen& Peters (1979:47)propose that 'the "external" negation of ( ... might be renderedinto English as "It is not true that (."' But this approach is on shaky ground, given that the occurrenceof the EnglishformulaIt is not
true that (or It is not the case that) is neither a necessary nor a sufficient
conditionfor the emergence of a non-presuppositional of a negunderstanding ative sentence-as Atlas, Kempson, and others have pointed out. A semantic as in Linebarger1981) theory which invokes an abstracttruthpredicate(TRUE, at either the object-languageor metalanguagelevel, as a kind of 'animus ex machina' for just those sentences where negation seems to be behaving externally, is as unconvincingas a syntactictheory which invokes phonologically and semantically null inaudibiliawithout providing solid motivation for the existence of such constructs. Another equally fundamentalproblemfor the utilizationof a truthpredicate in the representationof external negation is the fact (to be explored in more detail in ?2.5 below) that the function of TRUE as a metalinguisticoperatorin a truth-conditionalsemantic theory cannot be directly assimilatedto the behavior of true in ordinaryEnglish (or its cross-linguisticcounterparts),apart from the treatmentof negation.
1.3. THE KARTTUNEN & PETERS ANALYSIS. As mentioned above, the mon-
oguist thesis is incompatiblewith the defense of semantic presupposition.In6
One reason for the existence of this particular dichotomy is discussed in Horn 1978a (?5).
METALINGUISTIC NEGATIONAND PRAGMATIC AMBIGUITY
129
deed, monoguistslike Atlas, Kempson, Boer & Lycan, and Gazdarhave been more eager than reluctantto jettison any remnantof semanticpresupposition. But at least one majorrecent approachhas attemptedto combine an ambiguist line on negationwith a non-semantic-or at least non-truth-conditional-analysis of presuppositionalphenomena. Lauri Karttunenand Stanley Peters, in a series of individualand joint publicationsculminatingin Karttunen& Peters 1979, have marriedGrice's notion of conventionalimplicatureto Montague's truth-conditional formal semantics. As in Montague'swork, the logic is intensional but classically two-valued. Withinthis framework,a sentence like 1la not only entails 11', but is truth-conditionally identicalto it, since the entailment is mutual: (11) a. John managedto solve the problem. b. John didn't manageto solve the problem. c. It was difficultfor John to solve the problem. (11') John solved the problem. in that manage to conHowever, 1la differs from 11' NON-truth-conditionally,
tributes a CONVENTIONAL IMPLICATURE to 1la-and
1lb-both of which will thereby suggest somethinglike 1 lc. This conventional implicatureborne by lla-b is part of the meaningof these sentences, and is
thus distinct from what Grice calls CONVERSATIONAL implicatures; some of the
to its ordinary negation,
essential differences between these two notions are spelled out in Table 4 (cf. Grice 1975, 1978;Sadock 1978;Karttunen& Peters 1979).
CONVENTIONAL IMPLICATURES CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES
of expressions (a) Make no contribution to TRUTH conditions, but constrain APPROPRIATENESS
with which they are associated.
(b) UNPREDICTABLE,arbitrary part of meaning;
NATURAL concomitant of what is said or
must be learnedad hoc.

(c) NON-CANCELABLE;apply in all contexts.
how it is said;
NON-CONVENTIONAL
by
definition.
CANCELABLE
either explicitly (by linguistic context) or implicitly(by extralinguistic context).
(d) DETACHABLE:two synonyms may have
differentconventionalimplicatures.
(e) NOTCALCULABLE through any procedure;
NON-DETACHABLEif arising via one of the
content maxims(Quality,Quantity, Relation).

CALCULABLEthrough Cooperative
must be stipulated. (f) Akin to pragmatic (nonpresuppositions controversialpropositionsspeakertakes as part of commonground);cf. Stalnaker1974.
(g) Exhibit a well-defined set of PROJECTION PROPERTIES enabling implicata of larger
expressionto be computedfrom
implicata of its subparts.
TABLE 4.
Principleand maxims. Possibly relatedto Mill's 'sous-entenduof commonconversation'(1867:501) or Ducrot's 'sous-entendu'as discourseor rhetoricalnotion. Projectionproperties,if any, are poorly understood;conversationalimplicatures 'may be indeterminate' (Grice).
Crucially, the falsity of 1lc does not affect the truth conditions for lla-b: the former is true if and only if 11' is true, the latter iff 11' is false. Rather,
130
c representsan appropriateness conditionon the normal,felicitous utterance 11 of both la and llb.7 But now the old Russellian ambiguityof negation rears its hoary head: as Karttunen& Peters concede, 1lb can be uttered in contexts where 1lc is not taken for granted,as part of the common groundof discourse, but is only NOT in fact the very component of meaningbeing negated or denied. This reading of 1Ib, which K&P call CONTRADICTION NEGATION, andlink up with the familiar external negative operator of three-valuedlogics discussed in ?1.1, emerges more clearly with the right intonationcontour (cf. Liberman& Sag 1974)and an appropriatecontinuation: (12) John didn't MANAGEto solve the problemit was quite easy for him to solve. he was given the answer. K&P point out (46-7) that contradictionnegation-unlike ordinary, conventional-implicature-preserving negation-is incapableof triggeringnegative polarity items. Thus the ordinarynegation of 13a is 13b, where the existential shows up as any in the scope of negation: (13) a. John managedto solve some problems. b. John didn't manageto solve any problems. c. John didn't MANAGEto solve {some/*any}problemsthey were quite easy for him to do. he was given the answers. d. Bill hasn't already forgotten that today is Friday, because today is Thursday. (= K&P's 77b) But with contradictionnegation, as in 13c, no some/any suppletionis possible. Similarly,we find already ratherthan negative polarityyet in 13d, where contradictionnegation removes the conventionalimplicatumassociated with factive forget.
Linebargeralso explores the failure of external negation to triggerpolarity items; following Kroch 1974, she attributesthis failure to the interventionof an abstract TRUE predicate immediatelywithin the scope of negation, so that the first clause of 13c is assigned essentially the following logical form:
(14) NOTTRUE (13a)
We shall see in ?2.5 that this identification of externalnegationwith the abstract TRUE fails to predicate generalize successfully. K&P (47-8) account for their markedcontradictionnegationby assigningit wide scope with respect to materialwhich is conventionallyimplicated, as in 15b. Such implicata are always outside the scope of ORDINARY negation, as
7 Neither the originalGriceannotion of conventionalimplicature,nor its (re)working-out by In particular, the propertiesreferredto in (c) and (g) of Table 4 may be K&P, is uncontroversial. cf., interalia, Wilson1975,Gazdar1979a,b,Soames 1979,Horn 1979,1981. mutuallyincompatible: Since the relevant issue is the interactionof conventionalimplicaturewith negation, the more global questions can be safely deferred.
AMBIGUITY NEGATIONAND PRAGMATIC METALINGUISTIC
131
seen in 15a: (15) a. ORDINARY NEGATION OF 4): (1

(Here
{e
)e; (i)
b. CONTRADICTIONNEGATION OF (): (-] [?eA4)i];
[4iV]
()i])
represents the truth-conditional meaning of <(, and b'
its conventional implicata;the members of each ordered pair denote respectively the 'extension expression' and the 'implicature expression' for the negative form specified.) In the case under consideration, the ordinarynegation of 1 la amounts to conveying the conjunction 16a, althoughthe first conjunct is implicated and the second entailed; the contradictionnegation (e.g. in 12) amounts to the negated conjunction 16b: (16) a. It was difficultfor John to qj& -(John Jd). b. -(It was difficultfor John to ' & John pd). As K&P note (47), the contradictionnegation represented in 15b and 16b is 'by itself non-specific (in the absence of contrastive intonation)in regard to what it is that the speaker is objectingto'. In the languageof Karttunen'searlierwork, ordinarynegationis a HOLEto conventional implicata(a.k.a. presuppositions),and contradictionnegation is a PLUG.8 This approachechoes Russell's scopal analysis of the two negations (note that just one selected conjunct is negated in 2' and 16a, but the entire conjunctionin 2" and 16b)-as well as a similardevice, employing a kind of translucentbrackets, that was semi-seriously put forwardby Grice 1967 for derivingthe two readingsof Russell's 2. (Grice 1967finally rejectedthis bracketing approach, in favor of a somewhat vague pragmaticanalysis of presupin Grice 1981.) position and negation;but he has revived it for reconsideration We have arrivedby now at the situationdepicted in Table 5. (Note that, for Strawson, negation was unambiguouslyinternal-by default, as it were, since he never acknowledged the existence of sentences like 4 or 12. His position was probablyuntenable, and will henceforthbe disregardedhere.)
Do truthvalue gaps exist? yes no Do semantic presuppositions exist? yes no Is negation semantically ambiguous? no yes
Strawson: Russell:
Lukasiewicz,
Smiley, Herzberger, Katz: Karttunen& Peters: Atlas, Boer & Lycan,

Kempson, Gazdar:
? 'ambiguists' yes no yes yes (as conven. implics.) yes yes
no
no TABLE5.
no
'monoguists'
8 Cf. Karttunen 1974. Note that the 'plug' nature of contradiction negation is represented in 15b
An analysis similarto K&P's is that in Ducrot 1972,to be by assigninga tautologicalimplicatum.

discussed in ?4.2 below.
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On the one hand, we have the original ambiguist thesis on negation in both its classical (Russellian) and revisionist (three-valued) versions-as well as the K&P compromise position, which some have suggested has all the vices of
each withoutthe virtuesof the other. On the otherhand,we have the monoguist
antithesis which Occamistically denies any ambiguities in natural language negation, but offers no ready explanation for the intuition shared by ambiguists
of all camps that negative sentences like 2 and 1lb may be used in two radically differentways, with (as K&P note) distinct linguisticcorrelates in each case. What we need here is evidently a Hegelian synthesis-one, we must hope, more explanatorythan that the king of France wears a wig.
METALINGUISTIC VS. DESCRIPTIVE NEGATION
2. In the synthesis I shall advocate here, negation is indeed ambiguous, & Peters, contraAtlas, Kempson, Gazdar,et al. But contraRussell, Karttunen
and the three-valued logicians, it is not SEMANTICALLY ambiguous. Rather, we
are dealingwith a PRAGMATIC ambiguity,a built-indualityof use. If I am correct, and subscribedto we must reject the classical view-cited by Prior(1967:459) in varying ways by virtuallyall previous analysts-that 'all forms of negation are reducibleto a suitably placed "It is not the case that".' That we must reckon with a special or markeduse of negation,9irreducible to the ordinaryinternaltruth-functional operator,is best seen not in examples like Russell's 2'/2"or K&P's 1lb/12, but in environmentslike 17, where what
is negated is a CONVERSATIONAL implicatum:
men aren't chauvinists-ALL men are chauvinists. (17) a. SOME b. John didn't manageto solve SOME of the problems-he managed
to solve ALL of them.
Such examples cannot be collapsed with 12 under K&P's approachwithout incorporatingconversationalimplicata(like the conventionalimplicataof 15b and 16b)into the logical form for these sentences; yet conversationalimplicata by definition are not part of logical form (cf. Grice 1975, 1978, Karttunen& Peters 1979). The cases below are even more devastating to any generalized semantic account of markednegation, which would presumablybe driven to importing phonetic representationand inflectionalmorphologyinto logical form, within the scope of the negation: to solve the problem.) (18) a. (So, you [miYonijd] to solve the problem-I [maenijd] to solve No, I didn't [mYonij'] the problem.
b. I didn't manage to trap two monGEEsE-I managed to trap two
mOnGOOSES.
A related use of negation is found in the French example below, where the grammatical gender assignment and the woeful English accent are somehow
9 For expository purposes, the label 'marked (use of) negation' will continue to be employed as a pre-theoretical descriptor for natural language negative morphemes which do not correspond to truth-functional internal negation (i.e. to what I shall later term 'descriptive negation').
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broughtwithin the scope of negation:

(19) (Esker too ah coo-pay luh vee-and?) Non, je n'ai pas 'coo-pay luh vee-and'-j'ai coupe la viande.
Analogously, we see in 20 that one speaker may employ negation to reject the pragmaticsassociated with the registeror stylistic level chosen by another speaker in the discourse context (because of insufficientor oversufficientdelicacy): (20) a. Now, Cindy, dear, Grandmawould like you to speak a bit more like a lady:Phydeauxdidn't 'shit the rug', he {defecated/ pooped / had a BM} on the carpet. b. Grandmaisn't 'feeling lousy', Johnny, she's indisposed. c. We didn't {'have intercourse'/ 'make love'}-we fucked. In 21, one descriptionis jettisoned in favor of anotherwhose contributionsto truth-conditional meaning are virtually identical to it in the relevant context, but which differs from it in focus or connotation: (21) a. Ben Wardis not a black Police Commissionerbut a Police Commissioner who is black. (N.Y. Times editorial, 11/8/83) b. I'm not his daughter-he's my father. (cf. Wilson, 152) c. She isn't Lizzy, if you please-she's Her ImperialMajesty. d. For a pessimist like him, the glass isn't half full-it's half empty. e. I'm not a TrotskylTE-I'm a TrotskyisT. Such uses of negation may be marked,but they are by no means marginal or inconsequential in communication.'( Indeed, an instance like 21d has
'o Closely related to the examples in 21 is the use of negation to focus on and register objection to a previous speaker's racist or sexist vocabulary. Consider the truth conditions of sentences like this: (a) {Niggers/Broads} will benefit from improvements in medicine. Such sentences have received a good deal of recent attention (cf. Grim 1981, Stenner 1981, Taylor 1981) as philosophers have debated whether an objection to the world view which attaches to the use of loaded words like nigger and broad is sufficient to render the statements made via these offensive descriptions automatically false or devoid of truth value. For Grim, if (a) is bivalent (whether it is true or false), it commits us to a disjunction: (b) It is either true that {niggers/broads} will benefit from improvements in medicine or false that {niggers/broads} will benefit from improvements in medicine. Yet a commitment to (b) seems to entail a commitment to {racism/sexism}. However we may deal with Grim's problem (cf. fn. 14 below), it is relevant that metalinguistic negation can be employed by a speaker who wishes to reject the bigoted or chauvinistic point of view embodied in an earlier statement within the discourse context: (c) I beg your pardon: Lee isn't an 'uppity {nigger/broad/kike/wop/...}'-(s)he's a strong, vibrant {black/woman/Jew/Italian/...}. For someone who utters (c), as with 20-21, the denotative meaning of the statement under attack (what was SAID) may well have corresponded exactly to that of the rectified statement; the connotative meaning (what was IMPLICATED) cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged. R. Lakoff (1975:19-27) points out that we seem to need euphemisms in exactly those referential contexts where we also have slurs. It is thus significant that we find both euphemisms and their metalinguistic rejections in the Grim contexts above: (d) I'm not 'colored'-I'm black! (e) I'm not 'a gentleman of the Israelite persuasion'-I'm a Jew! (f) I'm not a 'lady'-I'm a woman!
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achieved the status of a cliche-second only perhapsto that in 22, where the play between ordinaryand markeduses of negation has entered immortality throughvaudeville: (22) (Who was that lady I saw you with last night?) That was no lady, that was my wife! Note that the second speakerin this routinedoes not intendto suggest that his wife is not a lady; rather, the negation attaches to the implicatureassociated with the first speaker's utterance. The implicatural mechanismhere is akin to that in an example of Grice: (22') X is meeting a woman this evening. Use of this 'would normallyimplicatethat the person to be met was someone otherthanX's wife, mother,sister, or perhapseven close platonicfriend'(Grice as 'non-controversial' 1975:56).Whilenot all speakersmay find this implicature as Grice maintains,it appearsto me that-to the extent it is felt to be present in 22'-it can be removed throughnegation: (22") No, he's not (meetinga womanthis evening)-he's meetinghis wife. While the relevant implicatabeing denied or forestalledin 22 and 22"result from the exploitation of the content maxim of Quantity('Make your contribution as informativeas is required'-Grice 1975:45),manner-generated implicata may also be rejected; e.g., (23) Miss X didn't 'producea series of sounds that correspondedclosely with the score of "Home Sweet Home" ,' dammit,she SANG 'Home Sweet Home'. Here what is denied is the reviewer's implicatum,devolving from an exploitation of the Brevity maxim, viz. that 'Miss X's performancesuffered from some hideous defect' (cf. Grice 1975:55-6). But we have clearly come a long way from either the well-behavedordinary internalnegationoperatoror the semanticexternalnegationoperatorof threevalued logics of the K&P analysis. What we are dealing with in the negative examples of 17-23 are reflexes of what Ducrot 1972 has aptly termed METALINGUISTIC negation-a
grounds whatever, including(as in 18-19) the way it was pronounced." It remains to be shown that these examples involve the SAME basic use of negationas that found in K&P's examplesof canceled or rejectedconventional implicata, as in 12. To this end, note first that, in the negative sentences of 17-23 (as in 12), felicitous use involves contrastiveintonationwith a final rise within the negated clause (the 'contradictioncontour' of Liberman& Sag), followed by a continuationin whichthe offendingitem is replacedby the correct item in the appropriatelexical, morphological,and phonetic garb-a RECTIintonation and rectification which point to a kinship with 'external' or 'con" Ducrot 1973,in of 1972,uses the new label 'negation place of his 'negationm6talinguistique' polemique'. I consider the earlier term more felicitous, especially in the light of examples not discussed by Ducrotand his colleagues,e.g. 18-19. Negationdoes constitutein these cases a way of rejectingthe languageused by an earlierspeaker,and is thereforeindeed METALINGUISTIC; but it seems stretching the notionof polemicsor argumentation to labelthis varietyof negationPOLEMIC. FICATION,to borrow a term from Anscombre & Ducrot. But it is not only the
means for objecting to a previous utterance on any
135
tradiction'negation:in the cases just discussed, like those of K&P, no negative polarity items are triggered. Thus, while 17b is possible with metalinguistic negation, its polarity counterpartis not: of the problems-he managedto (24) *John didn't manage to solve ANY
solve ALLof them.
And parallel to 13c, in which some/any suppletionis ruled out, we also find this: (25) I didn't [miYonij] to solve {some/*any} of the problems-I to solve some of the problems. [maenijd] Of course, the principalresemblancebetween the instances of markednegation introducedin this section and the classical examples of presuppositioncanceling negation discussed earlieris that both types occur naturallyonly as responses to utterancesby other speakersearlierin the same discoursecontexts (or as mid-coursecorrections, after earlierutterances by the same speakers). It is for this reason that I seek to encompassall these examplesunderthe rubric of metalinguisticnegation:they all involve the same extended use of negation as a way for speakers to announce their unwillingnessto assert somethingin a given way, or to accept another's assertion of it in that way. Given the behavioralresemblancesjust cited, as well as the prevailingOccamist considerations, there is no obvious reason NOTto collapse the presupposition-canceling negation of 4 and 12 with the negation attachingto conversationalimin 18a and 19, to morphology plicaturein 17, 22, 22",and 23, to pronunciation or syntax in 18b and 19, to register or speech level in 20, and to perspective or point of view in 21. rich, if brief, history. Donnellan 1966 coined the term to describe the two he found for a sentence like the following: understandings (26) Smith's murdereris insane.
a. ATTRIBUTIVE: Whoever it may have been who murdered Smith is insane. b. REFERENTIAL: That individual [to whom I refer via the phrase Smith's murderer] is insane. 2.1. PRAGMATIC AMBIGUITY. The notion to which I am appealing here has a
In 26a, the description Smith's murdereris used essentially; but in 26b, it is employed as a tool for picking out a specific individualand predicatingsomething of him (or her), regardlessof whether that individualdid in fact murder Smith. Similarly,Wertheimer arguespersuasivelythat sentences containingmodals, e.g. 27, are not semanticallyambiguous,but have either of two uses, as paraphrased in 27a-b, dependingon the system of rules which is being implicitly invoked: (27) Lee {should / ought to} be in Chicago today. a. EPISTEMIC: Accordingto my calculations,Lee is (probably)in Chicago today. b. ROOT or DEONTIC:It would be {desirable/ a good idea}for Lee to be in Chicago today.
136
(Kratzer 1977arrivesindependentlyat an analysis which also treats modals as pragmaticallyambiguous;Palmer 1979, Leech & Coates 1980 offer complex mixed treatments, incorporatingboth polysemy and semantic indeterminacy in their analyses of modal 'ambiguities'.) A thirdexample of pragmaticambiguityhas alreadybeen touched upon. As suggested by Grice 1967, 1975-and elaboratedby Horn 1972, 1973, Gazdar 1979a,b-scalar predicationslike those below can be consideredpragmatically version (the 'two-sided' underambiguousas between the implicature-bearing standingof Aristotle, with lower and upperbounds, which resultsin conveying 28a and 29a respectively) and the implicature-free'one-sided' version (with lower bound only, as in 28b and 29b): (28) Some men are chauvinists. a. Some but (for all I know) not all men are chauvinists. Some e if n (S not all . . ll men are chauvinists. b. LAtleast some J (29) It is possible that it will rain tomorrow. a. It is possible but (for all I know) not {necessary/certain} that it will rain tomorrow. b. It is at least possible that it will rain tomorrow. In these examples, as in those of 26-27, the context (either linguistic or extralinguistic)may explicitly or implicitlyselect one of the two possible understandingsas preferred. None of these proposed analyses is uncontroversial.Thus Donnellan 1978 treatmentof the ambiguityin 26 (but cf. Kaplan 1978, argues for a SEMANTIC 1977 for defenses of Donnellan 1966);the standardlinguistic line on Kripke between epistemic and root (deontic) readings(cf. Hofmann 1966, Newmeyer 1969, Horn 1972, Jackendoff 1972);and there are at least two recent accounts of weak scalar predicationsof the type illustratedin 28-29 which treat them as SEMANTICALLY-or at any rate, truth-conditionally-ambiguous (Cormack 1980, Burton-Roberts1984;also cf. Kempson 1982). Nevertheless, I believe the pragmaticversion of these ambiguitiesis largely correct(cf. Horn 1984),andthatthe line takenon such constructionsis naturally extendible to negation. What I am claiming for negation, then, is a use distinction: it can be a descriptive truth-functional operator,takinga proposition p into a proposition not-p, or a metalinguisticoperatorwhich can be glossed 'I object to u', where u is cruciallya linguisticutteranceratherthanan abstract
proposition.
12
modals treats them as SEMANTICALLY (and possibly syntactically) ambiguous
In claiming that negation is pragmatically,ratherthan semantically,ambig12 As Barbara Abbott has pointed out to me, u need not even be a specifically linguistic utterance, as seen by the function of metalinguistic negation in the following musical scenario: Piano student plays passage in manner L. Teacher: 'It's not [plays passage in manner JL]-It's [plays same passage in manner '].' The teacher's use of not is clearly not assimilable to anything remotely resembling truth-functional propositional negation.
137
uous, I am partly in accord with the classic monoguist position summarized by Gazdar (1979a:92): 'There are no grounds for thinking that natural language negation is semantically distinct from the bivalent operator found in the propositional calculus.' But the spirit (if not the letter) of this position is violated by my approach, which takes a wide array of uses of natural language negation to be NON-truth-functional, and indeed entirely non-semantic. (Note that the pragmatic ambiguity of negation, as conceived here, is not entirely on a par with the instances of pragmatic ambiguity just cited, where NEITHER understanding directly affects logical form.) If we temporarily set aside the more extreme 2.2. TRUTH VS. ASSERTABILITY. cases of metalinguistic negation (e.g. those affecting phonetic representation, as in 18a), then the distinction drawn above recalls a distinction made elsewhere, the import of which has been insufficiently appreciated: that of the truth of a proposition vs. the assertability of a statement or sentence. As Grice 1967 has forcefully pointed out, either truth or assertibility can be affected by negation; it is up to the addressee to determine just what the speaker intended to object to or deny in the use of a negative form at a given point in the conversation. Grice defends the position that ordinary-language or exhibits the truth-conditional semantics associated with the familiar truth table for inclusive disjunction, represented in the third column in Table 6. He deals with a potential
p T T F F q T F T F pV q T T T F Vq p F T T F TABLE 6. p T F T T -q (p--q) F T F F
objection to this claim as follows (V:9):

'If you say "X or Y will be elected", I may reply "That's not so: X or Y ORZ will be elected." Here ... I am rejecting "X or Y will be elected" not as false but as unassertable.'
Grice puts this distinction to work in defense of his truth-conditional analysis of conditionals. He begins by conceding that 30 does not have the truth conditions which we should expect of a negated material conditional (cf. the last two columns of Table 6): (30) It is not the case that, if X is given penicillin, he will get better. After all, this does not normally commit the speaker to an assertion of the conjunction 'X will be given penicillin and won't get better', i.e. the second line of Table 6. In the same way, I can deny Nietzsche's notorious conditional 31a without committing myself to the conjunction in 31b: (31) a. If God is dead, everything is permitted. b. God is dead and something is forbidden. Grice points out, however, that a speaker uttering 30-or, even more clearly, 30'-is not, in fact, truly NEGATING the contained conditional proposition, but
138
TO ASSERTthat proposition(V:5). HIS UNWILLINGNESS is rather ASSERTING (30') It is not the case that, if X is given penicillin, he will get better; it
might very well have no effect on him at all. Here as elsewhere, 32a is to be interpreted as a refusal to assert If p then q: rather than as a (descriptive) negation of a conditional whose truth value is determined in accordance with the material equivalence in 32b:'3 (32) a. It is not the case that if-p-then-q. b. -(p -- q) (p & ~q)
I do not want to insist here on a wholesale defense of Grice's analysis. His advocacy of material implication as an adequate representationfor the semantics of naturallanguageconditionalsis especially moot; indeed, the truth conditions for if-then statements have been passionately but inconclusively observed that 'even arguedever since the 3rd centuryB.C., when Callimachus the crows on the rooftop are cawing about which conditionalsare true' (Mates 1949:234). But the distinction drawn by Grice (and Dummett, cf. fn. 13, above)-between rejecting a claim as false, and rejecting it as (perhapstrue but) unassertable-suggests the proper approachfor characterizingthe two general uses of negation.14
13The same pointis madeby Dummett(1973:328-30), who drawsa distinction betweennegation outside the scope of a Fregeanassertionoperator,'Not (-A)', as opposed to the normalassertion he suggests, 'mightbe taken to of a negative proposition, '-(not A)'. The formerinterpretation, be a means of expressingan unwillingness to assert "A"'; the clearestcandidatesfor this species of negationare those where 'A' is a conditional.He cites exchangeslike this: (a) X: If it rains, the matchwill be canceled. Y: That's not so. (OR,I don't thinkthat's the case.) Here Y's contribution is not actuallya negationof X's content; rather,we can paraphrase Y as having conveyed (b) or (c): (b) If it rains, the matchwon't necessarilybe canceled. (c) It may [epistemic]happenthat it rains and yet the matchis not canceled. Dummett,in fact, goes beyond Grice, concluding(330) that apparently'we have no negationof the conditionalof naturallanguage,that is, no negation of its sense: we have only a form for expressingrefusalto assent to its assertion.'(WhileDummettoffersno explanation for this curious state of affairs,Grice 1967:Vdoes give a pragmatic story for the failureof conditionalsto undergo in passingthatthe notionASSERTABLEordinarydescriptivenegation.)It shouldbe acknowledged as employedby Grice,by Dummett,andby me-should properly be takenas elliptical for something like 'felicitously'or 'appropriately' assertable,wherethe adverbial hedgeis broadenoughto cover the wide range of examples under considerationhere. I take 'assertability'to be an instance of on a parwith 'Ca'n linguisticshorthand you say X?' or 'You can't say Y' forjudgmentsof syntactic (un)acceptability. 14 The truth distinctionappearsto vitiateGrim'sargument vs. assertability for the non-bivalence of (a) in fn. 10, above: while (a) does indeed commitus to the TRUTH of (b), it does not commit us to its ASSERTABILITY. Grim is in fact aware of this argument (293-5), but he dismisses it on the
groundsthat the existence of true 'unassertables' is 'somethingof an intellectualembarrassment'; an alternativetheory which does not posit them is to be preferred.Yet any such alternativemust countenancetruth-value fromclassicaltwo-valuedsemanticswhich may gaps-a majordeparture be neithera necessary nor a sufficientexpense for dealingwith presuppositional phenomena,and is in any case hardlya cause for intellectualpride. If true but unassertablestatementsmust be countenancedin any case (as the discussionin the text and below suggest), it is a simple matter
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CASES. We have noted that languages tend not to distinguish 2.3. THE SCALAR internal from external negation morphologically. It is thus especially significant that natural languages seem (almost) always to allow a descriptive negation operator to double for metalinguistic use as a comment on the utterance, challenging what is presupposed or implicated as well as what is asserted. One frequent use of metalinguistic negation-indeed, virtually universal (but cf. ?5 below)-is as a way of disconnecting the implicated upper bound of weak scalar predicates, as in 17 above, or the following: (33) Around here we don't LIKE coffee-we LOVEit. (Lauren Bacall, in TV commercial for High Point decaf) Again, let us focus on the contrast between 34a-b, or more precisely on their mutual consistency: (34) a. Max has three children-indeed, he has four. b. Max doesn't have three children-(*but) he has four. c. Max doesn't have three children, (but) he has two. It seems peculiar at first glance that the same state of affairs can be alternatively described in terms of Max's HAVING three children and of his NOT having three children. Following Mill 1867, DeMorgan 1847, and Grice, I have argued elsewhere (Horn 1972, 1973; cf. Gazdar 1979a,b for formalizations) that scalar operators like some (in 28), possible (in 29), like (in 33), and three (in 34) are lowerbounded by their truth-conditional semantics; and that they may be upperbounded (context permitting) by conversational implicature, triggered by Grice's maxim of Quantity. Given that all men are mortal (or chauvinists-cf. 17a), it's inappropriate, although true, to assert that SOMEmen are. Similarly, if I know that Max has four children, and this fact is relevant to you, it's misleading for me to inform you that he has three (although it's true that he does). In each case, I have said something true but implicated something false. Within this account, the negation in 34b does not negate the PROPOSITION that Max has three children; rather, it operates on a metalinguistic level to reject the IMPLICATUM that may be associated with the assertion of that proposition (viz. that he has only three). By uttering 34b, the speaker signifies unwillingness
to extend this treatment to cover Grim's cases. (Stenner, in his reply to Grim, advocates essentially this approach.) I have suggested elsewhere (Horn 1981, fn. 8) that the problems encountered by Aristotle and Lukasiewicz in their analyses of future contingent statements hang on the failure to appreciate this distinction. Pace Aristotle and Lukasiewicz, (exactly) one of the following two statements is indeed TRUE today: (a) There will be a sea battle tomorrow. (b) There will not be a sea battle tomorrow. But it may well be that (barring precognition) neither of them may be ASSERTABLE.Thus, the very birth-throes of three-valued logic (in Lukasiewicz 1930) may have been attended by an insufficient recognition of the truth/assertability distinction: an epistemic problem was misdiagnosed as a metaphysical one, and an improper treatment consequently prescribed. (Geach 1972:81 argues that this mistaken line on future contingents was not in fact taken by Aristotle, despite the standard interpretation; in any case, if the Aristotelian man was straw, Lukasiewicz fleshed him out.)
140
to assert a sentence which would induce a misleading implicature. The negation in 34c, by contrast, is naturally taken descriptively as attaching to the proposition that Max has three children. (The distribution of but in 34b-c is discussed in the Appendix.)
2.4. INtC(RPORAATEl) NEGAI (IONAS A DIAGNOSTIC. One important correlate of
the negative dichotomy resides in the inability of metalinguistic negation to incorporate prefixally: (35) a. The king of France is {not happy/*unhappy}-there isn't any king of France. The queen of England is {not happy/*unhappy}-she's ecstatic. It isn't possible b. It's not possible for you to leave now-it's necessary. *lt's impossible . probable l ,posbe f not probable ainnot t s otimprobable improbable not likely . not likely f not likely} if not impossible) likely} e but t certain (vs. fnot *unlikely unlikely
{
not interesting but f

*uninteresting J
In each case where the negative operator is used metalinguistically to deny the appropriateness of using a predicate which would yield a true but misleadingly weak assertion (cf. the preceding section), the negation cannot incorporate morphologically as un- or iN--perhaps because it is operating, in effect, on another level. (The failure of metalinguistic negation to trigger polarity items, as discussed above, should probably be pegged to the same factor.) The acceptable incorporated negatives in 35 all involve ordinary, truth-functional uses of the operator.15 Failure to recognize this diagnostic for metalinguistic negation mars an otherwise cogent defense by Gazdar 1977, 1979a of a monoguist analysis of natural language disjunctions. On the view that or is semantically ambiguous, a sentence like 36a will be assigned two distinct logical forms, corresponding to the inclusive (p V q) and exclusive (p V q) interpretations of the connective (cf.
'5 This account of the incorporation diagnostic must draw a sharp distinction between the lexicalized prefixal negation of the examples in 35 and the 'contracted' n't in examples like 34b, 35b, and numerous additional sentences scattered throughout the text. As these examples show, nothing constrains metalinguistic negation from contracting as an enclitic onto the copula. If (as has been traditionally assumed) the n't forms are produced by post-lexical syntactic and/or phonological rules rather than in the lexicon, the distinction is made automatically. However, as Jerry Sadock has pointed out to me, the adoption of Zwicky & Pullum's 1983 analysis of Xn't as an inflected form of the auxiliary element X, generated by the morphology, would require a different account here. I shall simply assume that the grammar has some way of distinguishing the lexical prefixes un-, in-, and non- (which are incompatible with metalinguistic negation) from the -n't forms (which are not).
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Table 6 above): (36) a. John is either patrioticor quixotic. b. John isn't either patrioticor quixotic. c. John is neither patrioticnor quixotic. This ambiguistthesis is rejected by Gazdar(1979a:81-2) on the grounds that it makes a 'bizarrelyfalse prediction' when the disjunctionis broughtwithin the scope of negation. Thus 36b-and 36c, which Gazdartakes to be its paraphrase-will be assignedtwo readingsby the ambiguistanalysis, with negation outside the scope of inclusive and exclusive disjunction, respectively. Given the standardequivalence (36') ~(p V q) (-p & -q) V (p & q), the exclusive readingof 36b-c will be true if Johnis both patrioticand quixotic. Gazdarconcludes thatthe ambiguistthesis on disjunctionis primafacie absurd, since 36b-c are patently false in this state of affairs. Yet Gazdar'sargumentcontains a fatal flaw: 36b does allow a readingwhich is NOT patently false, i.e. the readingwhich involves the metalinguisticuse of negation. Considerthe following:
(37) a.
b. *Maggieis neither patrioticnor quixotic-she's both! Not only is 37a a possible discourse utterance, it's also one with which most British subjects would happily agree (for the most prominentreferent of the proper name). However, this readingdisappears, as it should, when the negation is incorporatedin 37b. Since such incorporatednegation can only be descriptive, 37b is indeeda logicalcontradiction,as Gazdar'sanalysis predicts. A recently attested instance of just such a metalinguisticuse of negationas that contained in 37a is the following: (38) The Constitutiondoesn't say providefor the common defense OR the general welfare; it says both. (WalterMondale, at the DemocraticNational Party Conference in Philadelphia,1982, quoted in the N.Y. Times) As furtherconfirmationof the claim that the negation in 37a or 38 is metalinguistic in the strong sense intendedhere (as a commenton an earlierutterance ratherthan a propositionalnegation), consider the apparent(graphemic)contradictionin 39a, whichcan neverthelessbe resolved in the appropriate context, illustratedin 39b: (39) a. Maggie isn't either patrioticor quixotic-she's either patrioticor quixotic. b. -Say, {Clive/Fiona}, you have to admit your Maggie is [fYSr she's [aySo petriotik o' kwiksotik]. Curiously, Gazdar's argument-flaw and all-was prefiguredin a parallel attackby Grice (1978:116-18)on a differentambiguisttreatmentof disjunction.
peYtriaDik or kwlksaDik]. -No, I haven't. Maggie isn't [iY.r peYtriaDik or kwtksaDik]-
Maggie isn't EITHERpatriotic OR quixotic-she's
both!
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In Grice's case, the relevant 'strengthening' propertyis not the truth-functional one of exclusivity, but a non-truth-functional, epistemically based condition on the appropriateuse of disjunctive statements which Strawson and others or. On that view (cf. Grice have attributedto the meaningof ordinary-language utter license who or the inference that they do not 1967:I), speakers 'p q' know for a fact that p is the case (or, of course, that q is). Thus I cannot felicitously utter 40, on the 'strong' readingof or, if I know for a fact that my wife is in Oxford (and if this fact is relevant to you when I utter 40): (40) My wife is either in Oxford or in London. Grice (1978:116-8)notes that the 'strong'readingfor this disjunction(the reading which builds in the strengtheningproperty)seems to disappearunder nementionthatthe relevantnon-truth-functional gation, as in 41a; but he does NOT of the such of aspect interpretation disjunctionsmay indeed be canceled by use of as in 41b-d: metalinguistic negation, (41) a. Your wife isn't (either) in Oxford or in London. b. Your wife isn't (EITHER) in Oxford ORin London, dammit, she's in Oxford, as you bloody well know! c. I didn't do it once or twice-I did it once and once only! d. It won't be Noam's Pride ORResnic's Choice standing laurelcrowned in the winner's circle-it'll be Noam's Pride, you can bet on it! In these examples, a disjunctionis again disowned-not because it is false, but because the utteranceexpressingit would be too weak and hence regarded as unassertable. In 37a, 38, and 41b-d (as in 17, 33, and 34b in the earlier to focus on the implicatumtrigdiscussion) negationis used metalinguistically the maxim of In such gered by cases, the negation often seems to Quantity. build in a covert just or only which can in fact be expressed directly without changing the import.16 Comparethe versions of 42 with and without the pathat the 'exhausAnalogouscases based on clefts are adducedin Horn 1981for an argument tiveness' premiseis not part of the meaningof cleft sentences, i.e. that (a) does not (pace Atlas
& Levinson 1981) ENTAILor (pace Halvorsen 1978) CONVENTIONALLY IMPLICATE (b):
16
(a) It was a pizza that Maryate. (b) Maryate nothingother than a pizza. It may seem that (c) below, fromAtlas & Levinson, or the analogous(d), suggeststhat the failure of exhaustivenessto hold DOES constitutesufficientgroundsfor denyingthe truthof a cleft: (c) It wasn't John that Marykissed, it was John and Bill. (d) It wasn't a pizza that Maryate-it was a pizza, a calzone, and a side orderof ziti. In fact, if such sentences are acceptable(as Atlas & Levinsonmaintain), they are acceptableonly with metalinguistic Note first negation,cancelingthe upper-bounding (exhaustiveness) implicatum. thatjust may be inserted, salva veritate (et sensu), immediatelyafter the negationin (c) and (d) as easily as in the cases of 42. Furthermore, the same constructionoccurs withoutcleft syntax:
(e) Mary didn't eat (just) A PIZZA-she ate a pizza, a calzone, ANDa side order of ziti.
If Mary ate a pizza along with other items, it is undeniablyTRUEthat she ate a pizza; negation here, as in (c) and (d), is used to deny not truthbut assertability. (Thatjustor only can be inserted in these cases shouldnot be taken as evidence that metalinguistic not can be analysedessentially as ellipticalfor not only: cf. ?4.1 below. For additionaldiscussion of the relationbetween clefts and exhaustiveness, cf. Horn 1981.)
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renthesized element following metalinguistic negation: children-he has FOUR. (42) a. Max doesn't have (just) THREE b. You didn't eat (just) SOMEof the cookies-you ate ALLof them. c. Around here, we don't (just) LIKEcoffee-we LOVE it. d. I don't (just) BELIEVEit-I KNOWit. Another morpho-syntactic correlate of the metalinguistic/descriptive dichotomy exhibited by natural language negation can be found in the distribution of concessive and contrastive but constructions, discussed in the Appendix. 2.5. TRUTH, NEGATION. As noted in ?1.3, the Kroch-Linebarger TRUE, AND line on negative statements treats external negation as an ordinary truth-functional negative operator applied to a semantic TRUEpredicated directly within its scope. Consider sentences like these: (43) a. *She DIDNOTlift a finger to help. b. *We DIDNOT get up until 12:00. to Seeking explain the unacceptability of negative polarity items when they are read as 'denials', with rising intonation, Linebarger (35) cites Kroch's definition of 'external negation' as
'a "metalinguistic" usage in which the negative sentence NOT S does not directly comment on the state of affairs but instead denies the truth of the statement S previously uttered or implied. Sentence-external negation can be paraphrased as "The sentence S is not true".'
Linebarger formalizes this account of external negation by representing the logical form of the 'denial' readings of 43a-b as follows: (43') a. NOTTRUE (she lifted a finger to help). b. NOTTRUE (we got up until 12:00). What rules these out as possible well-formed formulas is that the negative polarity items (lift a finger and until) are no longer within the immediate scope of negation; thus they fail to meet what for Linebarger is a necessary (although not sufficient) condition for the acceptability of the relevant type of polarity trigger. In the same fashion, Linebarger (36 ff.) notes, the ill-formedness of 44 is correctly predicted by assigning it the 'external' representation 44': (44) *The King of France didn't contribute one red cent because there is no King of France. (44') NOTTRUE (the King of France contributed one red cent) ... One possible objection to this characterization of 'external' negation is thatas investigators as diverse as Frege (cf. Dummett 1973), Wittgenstein 1953, ?447, Ducrot 1973:119, and Givon 1978 have observed-ALL instances of negation (including the ordinary, garden-variety propositional negation which logicians try to capture) may be viewed as constituting, in Kroch's words, a way to deny 'the truth of the statement S previously uttered or implied'. That is, negative statements, regardless of the specific function of negation in question, are marked with respect to the corresponding affirmative; and they often pragmatically presuppose a context in which the affirmative proposition has been asserted or at least entertained. Thus Givon (109) concludes, from his extensive cross-linguistic survey, that negative statements tend to be uttered
144
'in a context where the corresponding affirmatives have already been discussed, or else where the speaker assumes the hearer's belief in-and thus familiarity with-the corresponding affirmative'; he shows that the reflexes of these 'discourse-pragmatic presuppositions' associated with negation include the restricted distribution, diachronic conservatism, and psychological complexity of negatives vis-a-vis affirmatives. Whether or not this characterization of negation is correct (cf. ?4.1), a more serious problem remains for the Kroch-Linebarger position. We have encountered many cases which pose insurmountable difficulties for any theory in which the special metalinguistic negation exemplified in 43-44 is directly associated with denial of truth: exx. 17-23, 30', 34b, 37a, 42 etc. It hardly seems plausible to analyse 17a (SOMEmen aren't chauvinists-ALL men are chauvinists) in terms of a Linebargerian representation like the following: (some men are chauvinists) ... (45) NOTTRUE Even in the more semantically-based examples considered by Karttunen & Peters 1979, such as 12 (John didn't MANAGE to solve the problem-it was quite easy for him to solve), we encounter the same sort of problem. An analysis of this 'external' or 'contradiction' negation along the line of the Linebarger model yields this: (46) NOTTRUE (John managed to solve the problem) ... Yet, as K&P correctly observe, the simplest truth-conditional account of sentences like 12 is one in which the proposition corresponding to the parenthesized material in 46 is indeed true in any state of affairs in which John solved the problem. The difference between the manage case of 12 and the classic king of France example in 44 is that propositions containing definite descriptions ENTAIL(as well as presuppose or conventionally implicate) the corresponding existential expressions; but X managed to c does NOTentail (though it may presuppose or conventionally implicate) that it was difficult for X to k (cf. Karttunen & Peters 1979, Gazdar 1979a). Metalinguistic negation, as we have seen, is used to deny or object to any aspect of a previous utterance-from the conventional or conversational implicata that may be associated with it, to its syntactic, morphological, or phonetic form. There can be no justification for inserting an operator TRUE into the logical form for a certain subclass of marked negative sentences, in order for 'external' negation to be able to focus on it, if metalinguistic negation does not in general directly affect truth conditions. Perhaps in these cases of non-truth-functional negation, we could try placing the negative operator outside the scope of a semantic operator like APPROPRIATE or CORRECT, rather than TRUE.But this 'solution' merely shifts the problem back one level, given that metalinguistic negation-unlike ordinary descriptive negation, or the so-called 'external' semantic negation of Kroch and Linebarger (which I am arguing does not exist)-is simply not a truth-functional operator on propositions. Thus representations like 47a are essentially as inadequate as
145
47b for the cases under consideration, given that those aspects of the utterance which metalinguistic negation is used to focus on may have nothing to do with the proposition expressed by the utterance:
(47) a. NOT {APPROPRIATE/CORRECT}(p) b. NOT TRUE (p)
Conventional implicata (or presuppositions) may be analysed as attributes of propositions (albeit non-truth-conditional attributes); but conversational implicata-and, a-fortiori, morphological and phonetic form, register etc.-cannot be. This essential difference between descriptive and metalinguistic negation provides the most serious problem for the over-Occamistic view of the strong monoguists, that all uses of negation can be assimilated to the same truthfunctional analysis. It must not be overlooked that marked negation differs from descriptive negation not only phonologically, morphologically, and syntactically, but also in semantic function. In particular, metalinguistic negation, as an extra-logical operator, plays no straightforward role with respect to such central inference rules as double negation and modus tollendo ponens (M.T.P.); these laws would thus be unstatable if all uses of negation were to be treated identically. If we chose to tar descriptive negation with the same brush as metalinguistic negation, we could no longer draw such basic inferences as these: (48) a. I didn't manage to solve the problem. .. I didn't solve the problem. (cf. 18a) b. Maggie isn't either patriotic or quixotic. .'. Maggie isn't patriotic. (cf. 37a) In the same vein, Wilson (149), citing disjunctive denials of the type first noted by Grice (cf. ?2.2 above), observes that the two clauses of 49 seem to constitute premises in a disjunctive syllogism, viz. 49': (49) The next Prime Minister won't be Heath: it will be Heath or Wilson. (49') -p pVq .'. q (via M.T.P.) Yet we don't actually infer q-i.e., The next P.M. will be Wilson-from an assertion of 49. But instances of DESCRIPTIVE negation DOlicense M.T.P.: if I know that Heath or Wilson has been elected, and I hear Heath's concession speech, I do have the right to conclude that Wilson (Harold, not Deirdre) was the winner. In short, forcing all instances of negation into a single Procrustean bed-however skillfully the bed may be designed-accomplishes little beyond playing Pandar to some rather odd bedfellows. But if metalinguistic uses of negation involve denial of assertability, rather than of truth, why is it that the syntax used to express this use of negation often seems to bring in some explicit reference to what is true? Recall that, in 34b (Max doesn't have THREE children-he has FOUR),I claimed that negation attaches metalinguistically to the conversational implicatum associated with the utterance of Max has three children, rather than descriptively to the prop-
146
osition expressed by that utterance. But at least some speakers can also get 50a, and sentences like 50b are also heard and interpretedwithout difficulty:
children-he has FOUR. (50) a. It's not true that Max has THREE b. It's not {true / the case} that SOMEmen are chauvinists-ALL men
are chauvinists. (cf. 17a) Parallel syntax can also be found in Grice's disjunctive and conditional examples, discussed in ?2.2 above. Does this mean that we're on the wrong track? Do these examples involve a semanticexternalnegationafterall-so that (Occam'srazornotwithstanding) conditionals, disjunctions, and weak scalar predications are all semantically ambiguous?No. Rather, what these sentences show is that the distributionof
the English expressions It is true that, It is the case that, It is so that etc.-
and their correspondentscross-linguistically-is a poor guide at best as to

where the LOGICAL is to be applied in the simplest, most elegant predicate TRUE
theory of naturallanguagemeaningand communication. semantic/pragmatic We often say that somethingisn't true, meaningthat it isn't assertable. This
is not ALWAYSpossible: thus it strikes me as odd to insert true into those
metalinguisticexamples hingingon grammar,speech level, or phonetics: (51) a. ?*It's not true that I [miYonijd] to solve the problem-I [menijd] to solve the problem.
b. ?*It's not the case that the dog SHATon the carpet-he
DEFECATED
on it.
c. ?*Ce n'est pas vrai que j'ai 'coo-pay luh vee-and'-j'ai viande. coupe la
It is true that the implicature-canceling examples of 50a-b remainproblematical. But it is no less true that, in ordinarylanguage,we often deny or ascribe truthto a given propositionin manyinstanceswhere the simplesttheory would representus as in actualitydoing somethingelse entirely. One case in point is inspired by an example from Wilson (151): (52) It's not true that they had a baby and got married-they got married and had a baby. Here the self-proclaimed'truth negation' focuses on an aspect of the use of conjunctionwhich Grice 1967, 1975has convincinglyarguedis not partof truth or meaning proper at all: the interpretation of and in certain contexts as and
then.17
17 Evidence for the view that conjunctions like
(a) They had a baby and got married are not semantically ambiguous between 'and also' and 'and then' readings includes the following facts: (i) On the ambiguist theory, conjunction in virtually every language would be ambiguous in just the same way. (ii) No natural language contains a single conjunction which is ambiguous between 'and also' vs. 'and earlier' readings; i.e., no language could be just like English except that it would contain a conjunction SHMANDsuch that
NEGATIONAND PRAGMATIC METALINGUISTIC AMBIGUITY
147
For an even more clearcutexample, I shall turn to some personallyattested evidence involving the extended use of true in a non-negativecontext. Several years ago, I was awakenedfor a pragmaticsclass by the sound of my electric clock-radio cheerfullydispensingreveille: (53)
After the familiartune ended, the announcercommented:'Yes, it's true; it IS time to wake up.' Now, whathas been assertedto be truehere?The proposition (abbreviated)in 53? Hardly: there is no proposition there, just a bunch of measures in search of a bugle. (As Georgia Green has remindedme, reveille does have words-indeed several alternatesets of words; but we cannot infer from the announcer's comment that he is transderivationally alludingto any particularset of words, or in fact that he even KNOWSany set of words.) Rather, the playing of reveille, given certain non-linguisticconventions in our culture, can be performedwith the intention of indirectly conveying the proposition that it is time for the reluctanthearerto awaken. It is this conveyed proposition which is being called true; the prior indirect assertion of this proposition is further illustratedby the anaphoricde-stressing in the radio announcer's utterance.18
(b) They had a baby SHMAND got married
would be interpretable either atemporallyor-on its asymmetricreading-as 'They had a baby and, before that, they had gotten married'. (iii) The same 'ambiguity'exhibitedby and seems to arise in paratacticconjunction,when two clauses describingrelatedevents arejuxtaposedwithoutany overt connective: (c) They had a baby. They got married. Grice'salternative univocal, position,whichI take to be correct,is that(a) is in fact semantically
but may CONVERSATIONALLY IMPLICATE (through an exploitation of the maxim 'Be orderly') that
the events occurredin the orderdescribed.The non-existenceof a conjunctionlike SHMAND could then be ascribedto the non-existenceof any maximof the form 'Be disorderly.'Conjunction is thus potentiallyasymmetricthroughimplicature,in the same way that weak scalar predications are potentiallyupper-bounded-in both cases, we can cancel or suspendthe implicatum if we don't want to set it off: (d) Some, {if not all I and possibly all}, men are chauvinists. (e) They had a baby and got married,but not necessarilyin that order. We have, then, one more instanceof pragmatic to add to the list begunin ?2.1. (Wilson ambiguity 1975:96-9, Schmerling1975, Gazdar1979aprovideadditionalsupportfor the Griceanpragmatic line on asymmetricconjunction;McCawley 1981:6-10, Bar-Lev & Palacas 1980offer ambiguist counterproposals.) 18 Thereare othercases in the literature in whicha proposition thatis pragmatically presupposed as part of the 'commonground'can serve as the basis for anaphoric-type de-stressingof material actuallyutteredfor the first time. These include(a)-cf. Morgan1969-and (b): (a) How does it feel to be a beautifulgirl? [no pragmatic presupposition necessary]
148
Parallelto the conjunctionand reveille examplesjust discussed is the phenomenon induced by rhetoricalquestions of the type which Sadock 1975 has
called
QUECLARATIVES:
(54) A: Who the hell buys that cockamamie line about pragmatic ambiguity? B: (a) Yes, that's true. (= Nobody does.) (b) No, that's not necessarily so; there mightbe somethingto it. Unlike the conjunctionin 52, neitherthe reveille nor the queclarativecase can involve embedding: (55) a. I guess I'll have to settle for polyester, because where (the hell) can you find a 100%cotton jumpsuit anymore? b. *It's not true that where (the hell) can you find a 100%cotton jumpsuit anymore. But this is presumablycaused by syntacticfactors: neithermelodies nor questions may occur embedded. In effect, the readingsof the type described here constitute a 'root' or 'main clause' phenomenon;hence the contrast in 55 between because (which acts like a coordinatorwith respect to other 'root' phenomena)and the subordinating complementizerthat. Crucially,however, what is being negatedor affirmed,agreedor disagreedwith, in 54B is not the question in 54A-which, like the tune in 53, has no obvious truthvalue as such (but cf. Karttunen& Peters 1976)-but ratherthe propositionwhich A is taken to have pragmaticallyconveyed. This suggests the line which I urge for 50, for the conditionalcases instantiating 32a (e.g. 30'), and for the disjunctiveexamples 37a and 38: it is not the propositionactuallybeing asserted which is denied, but the assertabilityof the proposition (along with any associated implicata)conveyed in the context of utterance. Following Kripke, what we must deal with here is a divergence of
SPEAKER'S
meaning from SENTENCE meaning.'9
(a') How does it FEELto be a beautifulgirl? Addresseeis a beautifulgirl.] [pragmatic presupposition:

(b) I thought you'd make it (... but you didn't.)
[no pragmatic presupposition necessary.]

(b') I THOUGHTyou'd make it (... and sure enough you did.)
Addresseedid make it.] [pragmatic presupposition: As in the example 53, the materialfollowing the stressed element in (a') and (b') is treated as thoughit hadbeen assertedearlierin the discoursecontext, andhence is de-stressed.A frequently encounteredexampleof pragmatically-triggered de-stressingis in sportscasters'updatesof scores: (c) will receive majorstress on 6 if and only if the Red Sox have just scored one or more runs: (c) [And {thatmakes it / the score is now} ...] Red Sox 6, Yankees 3. The Yankeescore, beingold information, countsas material alreadyasserted,andso is de-stressed. 19CompareKripke'sgloss (256)on an exampleoriginallydiscussed by Linsky and Donnellan. The situationis this: 'Someone sees a woman with a man. Takingthe man to be her husband,and observinghis attitude towards her, he says, "Her husbandis kind to her", and someone else may nod,
149
We should note one additionalway in which the use of the It is true that preface in ordinarydiscourse differs from the semantic value of truth predicates. Often, the only felicitous discourse-initiating use of the affirmativeformula It is true that is a concessive one. If we begin by affirmingIt is true that
snow is white, rather than merely stating that Snow is white, we normally
continueby appendinga clause beginningwith but ... (An instanceof this usage can be found in the text above, immediatelyfollowing 51c.) I shall not dwell on this phenomenon here, except to suggest that it seems susceptible to a naturalconversationalexplanation(a la Grice 1967), and to note that it gives us one more reason to dissociate the definitionof the semantictruthpredicate from the behaviorof ordinary-language true (cf. G. Lakoff 1975:259 for related discussion).
OTHER METALINGUISTIC OPERATORS
3. If the approachsuggested here is correct for negation, it is plausiblethat the naturallanguagereflexes of other logical operatorsshould come in similar
"Yes, he seems to be." Suppose the man in questionis not her husband.Suppose he is her lover, to whom she has been drivenpreciselyby her husband'scruelty.' On both Fregeanand Russelliantheories of truth, the statement (a) Her husbandis kind to her comes out false (since the individual actuallydenotedby the phraseher husbandis not in fact kind to his wife)-a resultwhichDonnellan1978finds uncongenial. Yet even on the referential reading, Donnellan is not totally confident in assessing (a) as true. Kripke points out that (a) seems to function ambivalently in dialogs like these: A: Her is kind to her. husband (b) B: No, he isn't. The man you're referring to isn't her husband. (c) A: Her husbandis kind to her. B: He is kind to her but he isn't her husband. As Kripkenotes, 'in the first dialog,the respondent(B) uses "he" to referto the semanticreferent of "her husband"as used by the first speaker(A); in the second dialog,the respondentuses "he" to refer to the speaker'sreferent.'Since definitepronominalization can 'pick up either a previous semanticreferenceor a previousspeaker'sreference',each dialogis equallyproper(Kripke,270). For our purposes,it shouldalso be noted that, as a free alternantof his reply in (c), B could have responded, (d) Yes, it's true, {thatfellow / he} is kind to her. But he's not her husband. Or again, adaptingan even more familiarexamplefrom Donnellan1966,we obtain this dialog: a martiniis a spy. (e) A: The man in the cornerdrinking B: Yes, it's true, he is indeed a spy. But actually, that's water in his martiniglass. Sports pages often provideinstancesin which the predicatetrue picks out not the entire proposition literallyexpressedby a previousutterance,but some sub-assertion withinit. Reportingon a postgameinterviewwith quarterback David Woodleyof the MiamiDolphins,afterthey lost the 1983Super Bowl game, a journalistwrites, 'It was suggestedto Woodleythat when many people rememberSuperBowl XVII, they will say the Dolphinslost because David Woodleyfailed to complete his last nine passes. '"That's probablytrue", Woodley said. 'Woodleywas not sayingit was true that the critics will blamehim. He was sayingthat the critics will be correctin saying the quarterback lost the game.' (MalcolmMoran,New York
Times, 2/1/83)
150
pairs, exhibitingmetalinguisticuses alongsidedescriptiveones. This is indeed what we find. Consider,for example, the extension of logical inclusive disjunctionto these examples: (56) a. Kim is bright, or {even / should I say} brilliant. b. New Haven, or the Elm City, is the pearl of south-centralConnecticut. c. Is the conductorBernst[iY]n or Bernst[ay]n? The formulator of relativity theory wasn't Einst[iY]nbut (cf. Einst[ay]n.) d. The currentPresidenthas appointedmore colored folk-or should I say blacks-to prominentpositions ... e. She deprivedher students of a lecture-or (better) sparedthem a lecture-on the performativehypothesis. (after Wilson 1975) f. Did Elizabethhave a baby and get married,or did she get married and have a baby? (after Wilson 1975, McCawley 1981) As Du Bois 1974 notes, a principal source of non-logical disjunction is the phenomenon of intentional mid-sentence correction, as in one reading of 56a,d,e-or in exampleslike these, fromDu Bois (8), where the self-corrections have 'survived presumablycareful editing': (56')a. I can only very brieflyset forthmy own views, or rathermy general attitudes. (Sapir, Language) b. Let us look at the racial, or rather,racist themes in the argument for population control. (Pohlman, Population: A clash of
prophets)
Metalinguisticuses of conditionalsinclude these: (57) a. If you're thirsty, there's some beer in the fridge. b. If you haven't already heard, PunxsutawnyPhil saw his shadow and we're in for six more weeks of winter. c. If I may say so, you're looking particularlylovely tonight. Here each antecedent clause specifies a sufficient condition for the appropriateness or legitimacyof assertingthe consequent, ratherthan for its truth. As with metalinguistic negation, we can find morpho-syntacticdiagnostics for metalinguisticuses of disjunctionsand conditionals:note that the disjunctions clauses in 57 exclude initial then. Ducrot (1972:175-8)adds to the familiarcases of 57 anothervariety of metalinguistic conditional statement, exemplified in sentences which translate as follows: (58) a. If the Cite is the heart of Paris, the Latin Quarteris its soul. b. If the Bois de Boulogne is the lungs of Paris, the neighborhood squareis its pores. As Ducrot notes, the antecedentin these cases is understoodas proposingto justify the metaphorin the main clause (by virtue of accepting the metaphor
in 56-56' cannot be paraphrased by either ... or ..., and that the consequent
151
in the antecedent). The sense is 'If you're willing to grant p, you must grant q.'20 Perhaps the closest pragmaticdoublet for negation, however, is offered by questions. Whatare generallylabelledECHO questions(or, followingPerlmutter
& Soames 1979:589-90, INCREDULITY questions) might, in the present context, be renamed METALINGUISTIC questions. As with the most natural occurrences
of metalinguisticnegation, echo questions often seem to require a linguistic context in which the originalutterance (be it a declarative, an imperative, or itself a question) has been previously uttered within the discourse. Consider the circumstanceswhich might evoke these echo questions: with Sally and Bill? (59) a. You did WHAT
b. Take out the WHAT? c. Do I WHAT?
The distributionof echo questions is determinedin accordance with the sentence-type they are used to echo. Echoes of declarativesoccur in declarative contexts, echoes of questions in question environments,and so on: Mary is dating{Fred/wHo?}l (59') a. John thinks
*who Mary is dating.
who Mary is dating. b. John wonders *Maryis dating{Fred/wHo?}

where WHOwent?
Andjust as metalinguistic negationis impotentto triggernegativepolarityitems or to incorporateprefixallyas descriptivenegationsdo, echo questions-as is well known-fail to exhibit normalinterrogativesyntax; they neither exhibit nor triggersubject-auxiliaryinversion. wH-fronting There is, then, reason to believe that the existence of parallelmetalinguistic/ descriptive splits for other logical operators,ratherthan supportingthe strong monoguistline on negation(as Kempson 1975:184suggests), in fact reinforces the line on negationurgedhere. If we are unwilling,in constructingthe simplest semanticand syntactictheory, to collapse the or clauses in 56-56' with ordinary inclusive disjunctions,the if clauses in 57-58 with ordinaryconditionals(whatever THEYare), and the echo questions of 59-59' with normalwH-questions, we must be equally unwillingto claim that all negations are one.
OTHER APPROACHES TO METALINGUISTIC NEGATION
4. The analysis presented here, on which markednegation is taken to represent a metalinguisticuse of the negative operator rather than (as with descriptive negation) a semantic operator which is part of logical form, bears varyingdegrees of kinshipto other accounts of negationwhich have been presented or defended over the last few years. In this section, some of the more
20 For readers who lack the appropriate Parisian frame of reference, the closest domestic counterpart I could devise is one based on my own hometown: If the docks are the burly forearms of New York, the subways are the pits.
152
importantof these accounts will be summarizedand comparedwith the view outlined in ?2 above.
4.1. FALSITY AND NEGATION: THE MONOGUIST THESIS REVISITED. We have
briefly noted the traditionembodiedin the work of linguistslike Jespersenand Giv6n, and of psychologists like Herbert and Eve Clark, in which negative statements are taken as generally markedor complex relative to their corresponding affirmatives. There is also a longstandingphilosophical tendency, manifested in somewhat different ways by Kant, Wittgenstein, Searle, and many others, of taking negative statements as constitutinga kind of special speech act of denial, on a differentlevel from the correspondingaffirmative statement. This tendency, however, has not gone unchallenged. Thus Gale (1970:201)observes that
'Many philosophershave claimed that negation signifies a person's mental act of denying, a statementthatis actuallymadeor envisionedas beingmadeby somerejecting,or rebutting one.
But, Gale goes on to point out, this account is not wholly satisfactory. It is simply not true that the statement addressed by a negative must have been either made or envisioned as being made. Furthermore,since positive statements can also be used to deny another's assertion, we can have no general equivalence of the form (60) It is not the case that S I deny that S. As Gale notes, if the above equivalence held, then (given the principle of the excluded middle, S V -S) 60'b should be just as necessarily true as 60'a: (60')a. Either it is not the case that S or it is [not the case that it is not] the case that S. b. Either I deny that S or I deny that deny that S. Yet while 60'a is indeed valid, 60'b is not. Furthermore, it does not follow from the right-handside of 60, as it does from the left, that S is false. Negation, Gale concludes, is part of the propositionalcontent of the statementin which it occurs, ratherthan markingthe pragmaticfunction of expressingthe speaker's propositionalattitudetowardsome affirmative statementthatwas (or might have been) made. Along the same lines, Geach (76) warns againstthe 'widespreadmistake' of assuming that
ABOUT
'the negationof a statementis a statementthat that statementis false, and thus is a statement the originalstatementand logically secondaryto it'.
Geach uses the behavior of non-declarativesto show that this approach is mistaken:
not mean (say) "Let the statementthat you open the door be false!"'
'"Do not open the door!" is a command on the same level as "Open the door!" and does
While the negative predicationsmay be linguisticallymore complex than their correspondingaffirmatives,they are on the same level logically: 'we must ...
NEGATIONAND PRAGMATIC METALINGUISTIC AMBIGUITY
153
reject the view that a negative predicationneeds to be backedby an affirmative one' (78-9). Both Gale's and Geach's caveats are well-taken;however, they seem to offer no explanationfor why luminarieslike Kant and Wittgensteinmighthave been deceived into drawingtheir distinctionsbetween the characterof negative and affirmativestatements.21 Nor is any connection drawnbetween the treatment of negationas a propositionaloperatorand the propertiesof morpho-syntactic markednessso characteristicof negation in naturallanguage. The solution to this stand-off, I suggest, is the recognitionthat truth-conditional semantics does indeed (as arguedby Gale and Geach) contain a propto descriptivenegationin the object ositional negative operator,corresponding language-but that not all occurrences of naturallanguage negation can be representedin this way. As we have seen, a need clearlyexists to accommodate a 'denial' use of negation;but once we have weaned ourselves from the strong monoguistthesis, there is no reason to expect the equivalence in 60 to hold. In any case, 'I deny that S'-as in 60-is too restrictive a gloss for the use of negation;we have observeda numberof cases where metalanguage-level a speakeruses metalinguisticnegationnot strictlyto DENY S (or to call S false) but rather,morebroadly,to REJECT S, or its implicata,or the way it was uttered. As remarkedin fn. 13, Dummett(328-30) is on the righttrackin characterizing this use of negation as 'a means of expressingan unwillingnessto assert "A" ' without necessarily constituting a willingness to deny 'A'. However, Dummett's neo-Fregeanrepresentations,utilizingscopal distinctionsto account for the differencebetween the two ways of takingnegation,may not be sufficiently general; '-(not A)' is unobjectionablefor descriptive (propositional) negation, but it is not clear that a representationlike 'Not(-A)' can be interpretedcoherently for all the cases of 17-23. Some of the recent radicallymonoguisttheories of negation suffer from the flaw noted by Galeandby Geach:the failureto distinguishnegationfromfalsity, and to recognize that to call a statementfalse is to say something(on a metalinguistic level) ABOUT that statement, but to apply (descriptive) negation to a proposition is simply to form another proposition which may itself be true or false. Thus Allwood, in his seminalunivocal analysis of negation, remarks
(43-5),
'We have in all cases taken negationto be the same basic semanticoperation,indicatingthat a certainstate of affairsis not a fact. We have taken negationto have exactly the properties of logical negation:always giving the predicationit operates on an opposite truth value ... Negationhas the same basic functionas falsity. To negatea certainstatementor to say of the same statementthat it is false is logicallyto do the same thing, namelyto claim that the state of affairsdescribedin the statementdoes not obtain.'
Allwood's identificationof negation and falsity is precisely the target of the warningsissued by Gale and by Geach.
21 It shouldbe noted thatone luminary,Frege, consistentlytreatednegativesentences as simple assertions of negative propositionsand explicitly warned against confusing a lexical form, i.e. negation,witha speech-actfunction,i.e. denial(Frege 1919,as calledto my attentionby Jay Atlas).
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Kempson's more sophisticated monoguist treatmentof negation also identifies descriptivenegationin naturallanguagewith 'the falsity operatorof logic' (1975:95);but from the context of this identification, she may be referring ellipticallyto the propositionaloperatorwhose semantics correspondsto falsity, i.e. a negative expression OFthe languageratherthan a negative comment ABOUT it. She goes on to present and challengea variety of presuppositionalist views of ambiguousnegation in which external or denial negation is taken as a semantic operator. Since I agree with Kempson that her 'denial' negation cannot be a semanticoperator,and is indeed 'one of the uses to which negative sentences could be put' (99), I do not wish to rebut the gist of her account. But she takes this correct observation as a license to ignore those cases of 'denial' negation whose behavior does not naturallyfall within the proper bounds for logical negation-or to subsume them within the general category of propositionalnegation, as Allwood does. Yet as we have seen, no single logical notion of negation as a truth-functional operatorcan collect all natural languageuses of negation. While Kempson concedes that 'marked(contrastive stress) interpretations of negative sentences' may generallyfunction as denials, she argues that 'this correspondence ... does not carry over to compound sentences' of the type illustratedby the citationfrom Strawsonmentionedin fn. 1 and repeatedhere: (61) Neither Aristoteliannor Russellianrules give the exact logic of any expression of ordinarylanguage;for ordinarylanguagehas no exact logic. But, in general, Kempson's citations of marked, 'presupposition'-canceling negation(cf. Kempson 1975:68,78, 86-7)-as Kiefer(1977:252-3)points out'can only be conceived of as answers to a previous utterance.' An example which Kiefer cites is this: (62) Edward didn't regret that Margarethad failed because he knew it wasn't true. Kiefer's formulation, needless to add, is totally consistent with the metalinguistic approachto markednegation. The most sophisticated,and probablythe most radical,of the contemporary monoguistson negationis Atlas. Whilehis positionhas shiftedperceptiblyover the years (from 1974 through 1977, 1979 [cf. also Atlas & Levinson] to 1980, 1981), as he has considered a progressively wider range of data, he has continued to maintainthat negationis ambiguousneither in scope nor in meaning (cf. ?1.2 above), even when that position has pushed him into the somber conclusion that no set-theoreticalsemantictheory can do justice to negationand hence to naturallanguage in general. Atlas concludes (1981:127),on the basis of the kind of data presented in ?2 above, that
'the rangeof interpretation includesstatementsthatare internalnegations,externalnegations, and metalinguisticpredications.Not-sentences are semanticallyless specified, and theoretically more complex, than the traditionin logical theory has heretoforerecognized.'
It should be clear that I share Atlas' misgivingsabout logical theories that either ignore metalinguisticuses of negation, or take them as a subcase of a
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special semantic external negation operator;but I cannot agree that the appropriatesolution lies in placing all our negative eggs into one 'radicallyunderspecified'basket. To put it anotherway, the evidence in ?2 does not support Atlas' radicalmove of throwingout the model-theoretic babywith the ambiguist bathwater. Ambiguisttreatmentsof negationare not entirelyabsent from modernlogic. To capture the behavior of external negation, Bergmann1977, 1981 differentiates the unmarkedauxiliarynegation 'not A' from a formalnegative operator which affects, not truthvalue per se, but 'anomaly'value. WithinBergmann's axis intersectsthe anomaly/non-anom'two-dimensional logic', the truth/falsity aly axis, producingfour distinct possible assignments. The ordinaryinternal negation of A will be true just in case the correspondingexternal negation is true and A is non-anomalous. As Atlas notes, however, Bergmann'ssystem inherits empiricaland theoretical problems from previous ambiguisttheories, in additionto some which are created by the innovationsin her account. Double negationno longerholds for internal negation; furthermore,on Bergmann'sprojection rules, a conditional like the following comes out true but anomalous: (63) If there's a king of France, then he's bald. Yet 'intuitively there is no linguistic anomaly in this sentence at all' (Atlas 1981:126-7). For our purposes, an even more fundamental flaw exists in Bergmann'saccount of negation:there is no obvious way for the 'anomaly'treatmentto extend from negative statements involving sortal incorrectness (Bergmann1977) or presuppositionfailure-as in the classic king of France cases-to those involving conversationalimplicata,grammar,style or register, phonetics etc. It is these cases which most clearly demand a metalinguistictreatmentoutside the bounds of logical semantics (one- or two-dimensional).22 As we have already seen, similarproblems arise in an account which is in some ways rathercongenial to Bergmann's.Karttunen& Peters (1979:47)correctly describe their 'contradictionnegation' as having 'a special function in
22 It is worthnotingthatthe sortalincorrectness(a.k.a. selectionalviolation)examplesdiscussed in Bergmann1977constitute much strongercandidatesfor presuppositionality and semanticexternal negation than the referentialcases (e.g. the non-existentking of France) on which most theirfirepower.It is more compelling-although, as philosophersand linguistshave concentrated Bergmannand others have pointedout, still not necessary-to diagnosesentences like (a) and (b) as sufferingfrom a terminaltruth-value gap than it is to performthe equivalentdiagnosisfor the king of France examples: (a) The theory of relativityis (is not) blue. (b) Socrates is (is not) a primenumber. The king of Franceis the kind of thing that can be bald (exx. 1-2 are each true in some possible worlds), but the theory of relativityis simplynot the kind of thingthat can ever-in any possible world-be blue. Significantly,as Bergmann(1977:65)notes, the diagnostictest of ?2.4 works as expectedin the sortalincorrectness cases, rulingout the external(i.e. metalinguistic) interpretation:
(c) The theory of relativityis {ninterested
[#uninterestedJ
in classical music.
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discourse' of contradicting'somethingthat the addresseehasjust said, implied, or implicitly accepted'. This may be a necessary condition for a negation to be functioningmetalinguistically,but it is not sufficient:many descriptive negations could be characterizedin the same terms (cf. Atlas 1980).Furthermore, K&P stipulatethat
'contradictionnegationdiffers semanticallyfrom ordinarynegationonly by virtue of having a broadertarget ... [it] pertainsto the total meaningof its target sentence, ignoringthe distinctionbetween truthconditionsand conventionalimplicatures.
This fatally overlooks just how broad the target of marked (metalinguistic) negation can be. One additionalcontemporaryaccount of negation,more neo-monoguistthan neo-ambiguist,is worth mentioninghere. Lehrer& Lehrerdistinguishtwo rival of the relationbetween scalaroperatorslike good and excellent: interpretations the 'hyponymy' interpretation,on which good is a superordinate term for the on which category containingexcellent, and the 'incompatible'interpretation, the predicates good and excellent are mutuallyinconsistent. They point out that 64a seems to supportthe former analysis, and 64b the latter (cf. the discussion of 34a-b in ?2.3 above): (64) a. This wine is good-it's even excellent. (L&L 15) b. This wine is not good, it's excellent. (L&L 14) They opt for the hyponymy interpretation,based largely on the acceptability of 65-a constructionwhich excludes 'true incompatibles',as seen in 66: That wine is not only good; it's excellent. (L&L 16) (65) (66) a. *That's not only a cat, it's a dog. (L&L 17) b. That's not only a car, it's a Cadillac. (L&L 18) I agree with the Lehrers' conclusion that excellent is a hyponym of good (cf. Horn 1972, 1973, Gazdar 1979a,b);but I cannot accept their implicationthat the negative predicationnot good in the first clause of 64b is to be regarded as somehow ellipticalfor not only good as in 65. Given the scalar natureof the
relation between good and excellent-i.e., that X is excellent unilaterally entails
X is good-64b and 65 will in fact convey the same information; the same point was made in ?2.4 in connection with the examples of 42. But ONLY those instances of metalinguisticnegation with an upper-bounding conversationalimplicatumarisingfrom the maxim of Quantitywill share this characteristic. Thus there is no way to extend L & L's ellipticalanalysis of 64b to conventional implicaturecases like 12, phonetic cases like 18a, morphologicalcases like 18b, or stylistic or connotative cases like those in 20-21: (67) a. ??I didn'tjust manageto trap two mongeese-I managedto trap two mongooses. (#: 18b) b. ??For a pessimist like him, the glass isn't only half full-it's half empty. ($- 21d) c. He's not only meeting a woman this evening-he's meeting his wife. (OK, but 4 22") Even among those cases which do involve cancellation of a quantity-based implicatum,the syntax may rendera L & L-style paraphraseawkwardor im-
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possible: (67') ?*Maggieisn't just either patrioticor quixotic-she's both. (cf. 37a) L & L correctly characterizethe 'more than good' readingof the negationin 64b as requiring that 'the intonationcontour ... remainhighinsteadof dropping, signaling a clarification to follow'-but this same characterizationapplies across the board to ALLinstances of metalinguisticnegation, whether or not in the mannerof 65. In short, takingmetalinguisticnot they are paraphrasable to stand for not only is as inadequateas taking it to representnot true.
4.2.
METALINGUISTIC NEGATION AND 'NIGATION MITALINGUISTIQUE'. AS
noted above, both the concept and labelof metalinguistic negationare borrowed from Ducrot 1972, 1973.For Ducrot 1972:37ff.,descriptivenegationconstitutes a comment on facts, and preserves presuppositions.23 Metalinguistic(or polemic) negation comments on utterances and challenges presuppositions. In Ducrot's system, presuppositions(presupposes) are distinguishedon the one hand from assertions (poses) and on the other from rhetoricalimplicata (sous-entendus). An intermediateformal language (which I shall call LD) is introduced(Ducrot 1972, ?5) for representingstatementsof ordinarylanguage in such a way as to allow presuppositionsand assertions to be distinguished in the predicate calculus translationsof LD formulas. The notation XIY represents a 'predicativepair', where X and Y can be filled by atomic or complex
predicates. Any LD expression of the form XIY(ai, ..., an) will then correspond to two predicate calculus expressions: one (the translation of X(al, ..., a,)) for the presupposition, the other (the translation of Y(al, ..., an)) for the assertion. Natural language operators (only, some) and negation are represented in LD
by 'copulative operations' which convert one predicative pair into another (Ducrot 1972:147).Two such copulative operations and NEG (presuppositionpreserving descriptive negation) are REF (refutational,i.e. metalinguistic,negation).Theireffect is indicatedas follows (wherenon-bold-faceNEGeventually
translates into predicate calculus '-' and ET into '&' or 'A'): (68) a. NEG(XIY) = X NEG Y b. REF(XIY)= - I NEG (ET (X,Y))
It will be immediatelynoted that the distinctionbetween 68a-b directly(mutatis mutandis)prefiguresthat between ordinaryand 'contradiction'negation in the work of Karttunen& Peters, discussed in ?1.3. The markednegationof
23
It is often difficult to determine just how a given expression may be (descriptively) negated;
e.g., (a) John, too, is coming to the party. (b) Even John passed the exam. However, Ducrot suggests that we have an intuitive sense of what the expression presupposes, and this guides us to discover what constitutes its descriptive, presupposition-preserving negation. Thus the descriptive negations of (c)-(d) can be given in (c')-(d') respectively (Ducrot 1972:105): (c) We have finally arrived. (c') We haven't arrived yet. (d) For a Frenchman, he knows a lot of logic. (d') Even for a Frenchman, he doesn't know much logic.
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68b, as in 15b, brings the presupposed (conventionally implicated) material within the logical scope of negation;but ordinarydescriptive negation, in 68a as in 15a, respects presupposed (conventionally implicated) materialby accomcordingit a kind of logical transparency.(Note that the presuppositional ponent in the output of 68b is empty, just as the conventional implicature component of 15b is vacuous.) But we have already seen that this scopal distinctiondoes not generalizeto the entire range of possible applicationsof metalinguisticnegations discussed in ?2; in particular, such foci of negation as morphological, syntactic, and phonetic form, conversationalimplicature,register, and connotative meaning are not part of logical form, and cannot be readily plugged into the format of 68b. Ducrot does acknowledge a 'rhetorical'function of markednegation, to to deny the 'sous-entendus' associated with a given utterance(corresponding Grice's conversational implicata);however, his representationsand account of 'la negation metalinguistique'do not do justice to the protean character of metalinguisticnegation in French (cf. 19) or English. Nevertheless, the account of metalinguistic (a.k.a. polemic)negationoffered in various works by Ducrot and his colleagues (Ducrot 1972:37ff., 1973:1245, Anscombre & Ducrot 1977)is certainly helpful and quite suggestive. Thus Ducrot correctly observes that (as noted above, followingGrice and Dummett; cf. ?2.2 and fn. 13)the negationattachedto conditionalstends to be interpreted only as a metalinguisticdevice indicatingthe speaker's unwillingnessto assert the conditional. Elsewhere, Ducrot points out that metalinguisticor polemic negation corresponds to a special negative speech act-a way of rebuttinga previously uttered affirmative. In an empiricalstudy, Heldnerexpandson the role of Ducrot's metalinguistic negation and its interactionwith scalar predications(cf. Ducrot & Barbault's essay in Ducrot 1973). A sample citation involving metalinguisticnegation is
(69) Jules ne chante pas bien, il chante comme un dieu.
'Jules doesn't sing well, he sings like a god.' Here 'the speakermakes it clear that bien must be replacedby a more adequate term'-one not necessarily (as with descriptive negation) below bien on the relevant scale, but possibly higher or on a different scale entirely (Heldner, 92; cf. the Appendix, below, for related discussion). As Heldner (65) points out, Ducrot and his colleagues originallytook the descriptive/metalinguistic negation distinction to be morphologicallyneutralized in French; but more recent work has suggested a candidate for an unambiguous sign of the latter. For Gross 1977, the use of non (or non pas), immediately preceding the negated item, can only be interpreted 'contrastively'-where Gross's 'contrastive'negationcorrespondsto the metalinguistic or polemic negation of Ducrot and his colleagues. (Anscombre& Ducrot independentlycite non as an unambiguously polemicnegation.)Thusthe negation in 70a MAY be interpretedcontrastively, but that in 70b MUST be (Gross, 47):
(70) a. Max n'a pas abattu un if, mais (il a abattu) ce pin.
'Max didn't fell a yew, but (he felled) this pine.'
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b. Max a abattu non pas un if, mais (*il a abattu) ce pin. 'Max felled not a yew, but (*he felled) this pine.' that reduction in the mais clause is obligatory in 70b; this is discussed (Note in the Appendix.) Gross (51 ff.) constructs an argument for distinguishing contrastive from ordinary negation, based on the distribution of partitive de + article vs. simple de. He judges 71a to be necessarily contrastive, understood with a continuation (... il boit autre chose); but 71b is understood non-contrastively: (71) a. Max ne boit pas du vin ' 'Max doesn't drink 'Max doesn't drinkwine wine.' b. Max ne boit pas de vin Gross finds that non (pas), as expected, occurs only with de + article: (72) a. Max a bu du vin, non (pas) {de l'eau / *d'eau}. 'Max drank wine, not water.' b. Max a bu non (pas) {dul*de} vin, mais de l'eau. 'Max drank not wine, but water.' Clefts, too, force the contrastive reading on negation, and hence demand the article: (73) Ce n'est pas {dul*de} vin qu'il boit, mais de l'eau. 'It isn't wine that he drinks, but water.' If, as is reasonable, we take the use of de without the article to constitute a classic negative polarity item in French (cf. Gaatone 1971, Horn 1978a,b), then Gross's correlation of de + article with contrastive (i.e. metalinguistic or polemic) negation will define a diagnostic for French parallel to the observation for English (Karttunen & Peters 1979, Linebarger 1981; cf. ?1.3 above) that external or contradiction negation-and, by extension, the generalized metalinguistic operator (cf. ?2.1)-fails to trigger negative polarity items. But the evidence is a bit murkier than Gross intimates. For Heldner (77), both 74a and 74b are acceptable in isolation: (74) a. Je ne bois pas du vin, (*mais) je bois de la grenadine. b. Je ne bois pas de vin, mais je bois de la grenadine. The former is interpreted as specific in time and space (= 'I am not drinking wine, I'm drinking grenadine'); the latter is taken as habitual (= 'I don't drink wine, but I drink grenadine'). Crucially, however, Heldner agrees with Gross's findings as to the unacceptability of the polarity item in the unambiguously metalinguistic negation of 72b.24 4.3. WILSON ON NEGATION.The English-language account of negation bearthe ing greatest kinship to the approach taken in ?2 is probably that of Wilson. She takes as her primary data a wide variety of uses of negation, many derived
As carefullydocumentedby Danell (1974;425),much more is going on here than meets the the distribution of pas du X (or pas un X) vs. pas de X eye. The interplayof factors determining is extremely complex, hingingon such variablesas the scope of negation, the modality of the sentence, the meaningof the verb, the natureof the complement(s),and the 'degreeof existence' of the object focused by negation.
24
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from Grice, which are not reducible to garden-varietydescriptive negation, includingthe following (cf. Wilson, 149 ff.): (75) a. I'm not happy: I'm ecstatic. b. The next Prime Ministerwon't be Heath: it will be Heath or Wilson. (= 49 above)
c. I don't love Johnny: I love Johnny or Billy. Althoughthe passage that follows (150), inspiredby examples like those in 75, does exhibit the errorof identifyingordinarydescriptivenegationwith falsity, as decried by Geach (cf. ?4.1), we are given a clear descriptionof why natural language negation cannot always be reduced to the familiarone-place logical connective:
'To assert that not-p (or to deny that p) cannot be the same thingas to assert thatp is false. It may also be to assert that p is inadequateto the facts without necessarilybeing false: it may be too weak, or too strong,or misleading... Once negationandfalsity are distinguished, could be made in terms of falsity, while semanticstatementsof entailmentand contradiction the treatmentof negationcould include, but go beyond, relationsof falsity alone.'
Given the existence of examples like 75, there must be non-truth-functional of (at least some uses of) negation-instances in aspects to the interpretation which the value of not-p cannot be simply a functionof the value of p. In these examples, we see that the falsity of p is a sufficientbut not a necessary reason for asserting not-p: given that utteringp might suggest q, and that one does not wish to suggest q, one might say 'not-p' (Wilson, 151).25
25 Kempson and her students, in recent publishedand unpublishedwork (cf. Kempson 1975, 1982, Cormack 1980, Burton-Roberts 1984)have drawn a rather differentconclusion from the existence of examplesof the Grice-Wilsonvariety. Considernegationslike 75a, or the following: (a) Justindidn'tpaint three squares,he paintedfour. Cormack(p. 6) pointsout thatthese appearparadoxical: 'if Justinpaintedfoursquares,he certainly as Burtonpaintedthree;if someoneis ecstatic they are certainlyhappy,and so on.' Furthermore, Roberts observes, (b) is apparentlyparadoxical(relevantto standardmodal systems) and yet is acceptable: (b) It's not possible that mammalssuckle their young, you ignoramus,it's downrightnecessary. Note that incorporation is impossiblehere, as the diagnostictest in ?2.4 predicts: (b') *It's impossiblethat mammalssuckle their young, you ignoramus,it's downrightnecessary. We have alreadyconsideredandrejectedLehrer& Lehrer'sellipticalapproach to Cormackand Burton-Roberts's 'paradoxical negations'(cf. ?4.1). Burton-Roberts opts for a differentanalysis, one in which the weak scalar element (possible, three, happy etc.) is taken as semanticallyambiguousbetweenthe 'one-sided'reading,whichis lower-bounded only, andthe 'two-sided'reading, which is lower- and upper-bounded: 'As Cormackpoints out, the alternativeto this is to invoke a special (denial, quotational) negationto handlethe phenomenon(an alternativethat she rejects in favor of treatingimplicatures semantically).' But as arguedby Horn 1984, this move by the membersof what I call the London School of Parsimony-in which a strictlymonoguistline on negationis offset by a radicallyambiguistline on scalarpredications-is not compelling.Note that the London School framework generatesan infinitudeof logical ambiguities: one for each weak or intermediate scalar value, includingevery
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What Wilson does not make clear is just how the fact that some instances
of not-p count as 'refusals to assert' p is to be related to the fact that lating into logical form as '-'.
OTHER
instances of not-p do contain negationas an object-language connective, transWhat is lacking here is precisely a full char-
acterizationof the distinctionbetween negationas a one-place truth-functional connective (NOT equivalent to falsity, for the reasons noted by Geach) and negation as a metalinguisticobjection to some aspect of a previous utterance. In particular,just as not all uses of metalinguisticnegationcan be analysed as semantic external negation-or as negationoutside the scope of a semantic operatorTRUE-it is also the case (althoughon a subtlerlevel) that not all the cases explored in ?2 can be taken as 'refusals to assert' a given proposition (or sentence; Wilson is not entirely clear on just what p stands for in the passages cited above). Her characterizationcollects those instances where negation attaches to conversational implicata, along with those involving conventional implicata or presuppositions (notions whose utility Wilson challenges); but it does not directly generalize to examples like 18a-b or 19, where the objection is not to the ASSERTION of a given proposition(much less to the truthof that proposition),but ratherto the way that the propositionwas reified into a sentence, or the way that the sentence was uttered. The use of negation to signal that a speaker finds a given proposition unassertable(cf. Grice 1967, Dummett 1973, Ducrot 1973, Grim 1981, as well as Wilson 1975) is appropriatelymore inclusive than the external negation operators of the logical ambiguists(Karttunen& Peters 1979, Bergmann1981, and Linebarger 1981), but is itself a proper subcase of the generalized use of negation as a metalinguisticoperator. Ironically, it is Wilson herself who cites and attacks two alternativeviews of marked negative statements-which, while not fully fleshed out, more closely anticipate the notion of metalinguisticnegation than anything in her own work or in the dissections of negative sentences at the hands of other logicians, philosophers, and linguists. The relevant excerpts, from Fillmore 1969 and Kiparsky & Kiparsky 1970, emanate from the heady period immediately following the discovery by generative linguists of those great presuppositional vistas and swamps; as is typical of that period, they combine keen
cardinal number. Having argued against just such ambiguist analyses (those of Aristotle's De Interpretatione, of Hamilton 1860, and of Smith 1969), I remain reluctant to abandon the view set out in Horn 1972, 1973 (cf. also Grice 1967, Gazdar 1979a,b), according to which scalar operators are semantically unambiguous, but build in a potential pragmatic ambiguity, based on whether the context induces a generalized quantity-based implicature (cf. ?2.3 above). My reluctance is reinforced on the one hand by the demonstration (Horn 1984) that privative ambiguity cannot simply be argued away-a step which represents a cornerstone in the London School's approach-and on the other hand by the arguments in the present paper. I have tried to show that a pragmatic ambiguity can be motivated for negation, not only in the scalar cases under discussion here, but in a wide range of examples for which the considerations specified by Cormack, Burton-Roberts, and Kempson are irrelevant. The 'alternative' rejected by Cormack in the passage cited above in fact offers the most general and most elegant account of 'paradoxical' and related uses of negation, while preserving the Gricean line on scalar 'ambiguities'.
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insight with a certain lack of rigor and precision:

'Uses of the verb chase presupposethat the entity identifiedas the direct object is moving fast. Uses of the verb escape presupposethat the entity identifiedby the subjectnoun-phrase was containedsomewhereby force previousto the time of focus. These presuppositions, as expected, are unaffectedby sentence negation: rchased (58) The dog didn't chase the cat. from the tower. t escaped tdidn't escapeJ It seems to me that sentences like 60 and 61 are partlycommentson the appropriateness of the words chase and escape for the situationsbeingdescribed.These are sentencesthatwould most naturallybe used in contexts in which the word chase or escape hadjust been uttered: (60) I didn't "chase" the thief; as it happened,he couldn't get his car started. (61) I didn't "escape" from the prison;they released me.' (Fillmore,381-2) (59) He 'If you want to deny a presupposition,you must do it explicitly:
Mary didn't CLEAN the room; it wasn't dirty.
Abe didn't REGRET that he had forgotten;he had remembered. The secondclausecasts the negativeof the firstintoa different level;it's not the straightforward denial of an event or situation, but ratherthe denial of the appropriateness of the word in word question [in small capitals above]. Such negations sound best with the inappropriate stressed.' (Kiparsky& Kiparsky,351)
These passages are quoted by Wilson (84) in the course of her blistering attack on all extant presuppositionalisttheories, includingthose of Fillmore and the Kiparskys. Her objections to the views illustratedhere have more to do, I think, with her skepticismabout the viabilityof semantic(andpragmatic) notions of presuppositionthan with the metalinguisticline on so-called 'external'negation;she also (quiteproperly)attackstwo of the weakercandidates for presuppositionalstatus, Fillmore's bachelor and the Kiparsky'sclean. In assumingthat markednegationcan only be used to deny 'presuppositions', Wilson may or may not be faithfulto what Fillmoreand the Kiparskyshad in mind. In any case, I have arguedfor a differentaccount of the metalinguistic use of negation-one which strikesme as entirelycompatiblewith more recent theories of presuppositionalphenomena,includingthe context-cancelablepresuppositionsof Gazdar 1979a,band the orderedentailmentsof Wilson & Sperber 1979. Note, however, that both the excerpts above, from Fillmore and from Kiparsky & Kiparsky, specifically allude not only to the fact that metalinguistic negationis used to object to an earlierutteranceas inappropriate-ratherthan to judge a proposition previously expressed as false-but also that it occurs (as does any metalinguisticoperator)on 'a differentlevel', i.e. as a predication
ABOUT the object language rather than WITHIN it. Moreover, while Wilson cor-
rectly recognizes that we cannot define all instances of external or presupposition-cancelingnegation as 'denials of appropriateness',as the Kiparskys seem to believe (Wilson, 84-5), their notion does provide a closer approximation to the general phenomenon of metalinguisticnegation than Wilson's own view of markednegation as a refusal to assert a given proposition.
METALINGUISTIC NEGATION AND PRAGMATIC AMBIGUITY CONCLUDING REMARKS
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5. I have argued here that marked negation is a reflex of an extended metalinguistic use of the negative operator in English and other languages. Negative morphemes generally allow (in principle) both descriptive and metalinguistic functions; and the context often serves-as is usual with pragmatic ambiguityto select one of these uses as the more plausible or salient. In some cases, a particular morphological realization of negation may in fact force or exclude a particular understanding. (Again, this is a frequent occurrence in the realm of pragmatic ambiguity: cf. Zwicky & Sadock 1975, Horn & Bayer 1984.) Thus, as we saw in ?4.2, Fr. non (pas), placed immediately before the item in the focus of negation, must be interpreted metalinguistically. However, Korean may offer an instance of one morphological negation which is unambiguously descriptive, as against another which may be interpreted either descriptively or metalinguistically. The two constructions in question are the 'short form' an(i), placed before the verb, and the 'long form' an(i) hada (literally 'not do'), placed after the verb stem suffixed by the nominalizer -cil-ji. Thus, corresponding to a basic affirmative sentence like 76a, we have the short-form negative 76b and the long-form negative 76c: 'Mica sleeps.' (76) a. Mica ka canta b. Mica ka an(i) canta 'Mica does not sleep.' c. Mica ka ca-ci ani hantaj The issue is whether 76b-c, and other frames in which these constructions function, differ in meaning or use-and, if so, how. Kuno (1980:162-3) finds that the two constructions are either interchangeable or differ only in emphasis; others find a subtle difference, in that the former is a 'verb negation' and the latter a 'sentence negation'. This distinction, as Kuno explicates it, is reminiscent of (but not identical to) the internal/external dichotomy we have discussed. Other researchers have taken different, often conflicting (if not internally inconsistent) positions. Choi 1983 considers several possibilities raised in these studies, and concludes that the closest match for the two Korean constructions within the Western literature on negation is Aristotle's contrary vs. contradictory negation (cf. Horn 1972, 1978a). In any case, Choi's data indicate that the preverbal short form is always used descriptively, while the long form is not restricted to metalinguistic uses-and indeed often 'fills in' for the distributionally defective short form when the syntax demands. If the choice to use long-form negation is often interpreted metalinguistically in those contexts which would have permitted the short form, this interpretive tendency may well be grounded in the pragmatic 'least effort' factors explored insightfully by McCawley 1978. An additional factor relevant to the Korean case is the restricted scope often associated with the unmarked negative form in verb-final languages. Kuno notes that the scope of the Japanese negative -na-i is generally limited to the immediately preceding verb (although quantifiers can 'escape' this restriction,
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and come within the scope of a non-contiguousnegation).The normalTurkish formdegil negation-mA-is similarlyrestricted,with the suppletiveperiphrastic showing up in contrastive and other contexts.26 Whatever the details of the behavior of negation in specific verb-finallanguages (or recalcitrant languagesof othertypologies),the over-allpatternseems confirmed:no languagecontains two negativeoperatorscorresponding exactly to descriptive and markednegation, whether the latter is characterizedas an external semantic operator or (as urged here) a metalinguisticuse of basic negation. At the same time, every languagecontains at least one negativemorpheme which can be used either descriptively(to form a negative proposition) or metalinguistically(to object to a previous utterance). One issue remaining is the directionality of the relationshipbetween descriptive and metalinguisticuses of negation:which use is primaryand which derivative? Or do both uses branchoff separatelyfrom some more basic, undifferentiatednotion? I have little to contributeon this point, except to note that the connection is explainablein either direction. Some evidence from acquisitiontends to indicatethat, at least in ontogenetic development, the metause is a later specialization.Fraiberg linguisticuse is prior;the truth-functional (1959:62-6) has written eloquently of the power and autonomy which young children associate with their first uses of the magic No; negative utterances
26 Cf. McGloin 1982for a discussion of other considerationsrelevant to the interpretation of the interactionof contrastivenegation and the topic Japanese negative sentences, in particular marker wa. She cites this three-waydistinction in English(Horn1978a: 137,adaptedfromJespersen 1924): (a) She isn't pretty. (= less than pretty) (a') She isn't (ust) pretty, she is beautiful.(= more than pretty) (a") She isn't pretty, but she is intelligent.(= other than pretty) McGloinnotes that the unmarked (descriptive)'less than' readingcan occur whetheror not the scalar element is suffixedby wa. Thus both (b) and (c) may be read as conveying that it is 'less than', i.e. cooler than, hot:
(b) Atsuku na-i

hot
NEG-PRES
(c) Atsuku wa na-i hot TOP NEG-PRES
'It isn't hot.'
But only (b) can be given the non-scalar'otherthan'interpretation (e.g. 'It's not hot but it is dirty.') By contrast, McGloinreportsthat neither(b) nor (c) can be read in the mannerof Englishmetalinguistic scalar negations(e.g. (a') above, 17, 34b, 64b, 75), where the negationfocuses on the associatedwithweakscalarpredications. In orderto get sucha reading, upper-bounding implicature a periphrastic form must be employed:
(d) Atsui dokoroka nietagit-te i-ru yo. hot far.from boiling be-PRES
'It's far from being hot: it's boiling.'

(e) Atsui nante yuu mon ja na-i. Nietagit-te i-ru yo.
say 'It's not somethingyou can call hot. It's boiling.' (McGloin,57-8) factorsbearingon the issue of negativescope (Cf. also Davison 1978for a studyof some pragmatic in verb-finallanguages.)
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may well accompanythe very behaviorbeing abjuredor denied, since negation constitutes a 'politicalgesture', indeed a 'declarationof independence'for the toddler. Such uses of negation, however we may analyse them in terms of the adult language, are clearly not truthfunctions. However, for what it is worth, & Gill (1977:169-70)reportthat the chimpLana, havingbeen taught Rumbaugh the propositional,truth-functional (descriptive)use of negation as part of her computer-based symbolic repertoire of 'Yerkish', spontaneously innovated what can only be viewed as metalinguisticuses of the same negative operator. Of course, even if we conclude that the generalizedmetalinguisticuse of negation as a sign of objection or refusal is learnedearlierthan its logical, truthfunctional use, it does not follow that this order of development should be associated with any logical asymmetryin the account we give for negation(or, analogously, for the other operators)in an idealized competence model of the adult language. I have maintainedin this paperthat conditionson truthmust be kept distinct from conditions on assertability,and that more explanatoryburdenshould be shifted from the former onto the latter. I have also arguedthat, while there is indeed only one semantic negation operator in English and other languages, the ordinarytruth-functional of this operatormotivates it for an interpretation extended use as a general metalinguisticsign of rejectionor objection, leveled expression or the mannerin against the choice of a particularobject-language which that expression was overtly realized. I have tried to pinpoint some of the linguisticcorrelatesassociatedwith metalinguistic anddescriptivenegation, in supportof the view that all negative tokens can be assigned to one of these two basic types. In reply to the query posed by the title of Atlas 1981, 'Is not logical?', some have answered 'yes' and others (includingAtlas himself) 'no'. I conclude that the only full and complete answer must be 'sometimes', i.e. when it is funcNeither the monoguistnor tioning descriptively ratherthan metalinguistically. the ambiguistapproachto the data we have considered can deal successfully with the unity and diversity of the phenomenonof metalinguisticnegation. use of negation How then are we to representthe effect of the metalinguistic within a formaltheory of naturallanguagediscourse?27 This is a good question,
27 One consequence of the proposal to eliminate so-called (semantic) 'external' negation is that we are free to adopt whichever theory of descriptions (or of factive predicates) best fits the facts, ignoring the role of negation as a 'presupposition-canceler'. The approach embodying a pragmatic distinction between descriptive and metalinguistic uses of negation is neutral with respect to those issues which divided Strawson from Russell, or Gazdar from Karttunen & Peters. We should not be surprised, however, if the formal semantics of the resultant theory turns out fairly conservative. When the function of negation as a plug for presuppositions and implicatures is removed from logical semantics, then the motivation for semantic presuppositions, for truth-value gaps, and for supernumerary non-bivalent truth values diminishes, if it doesn't disappear entirely. In contrast, the conversationalist line (favored at times by Grice, Wilson, and Kempson) on explaining away presuppositions-in particular, the definite description and factive cases-may prove ultimately inadequate, as argued by Soames 1976 and by Kiefer (1977, ?4). The jury, despite the new evidence it may have received, is evidently still out.
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but one which cannot be directlyaddressedhere. The formulation of its answer would, and I hope will, lead to a future paper, perhaps one which takes the present work as its departurepoint.
APPENDIX Anothercorrelateof the metalinguistic/descriptive split manifestedby naturallanguagenegation is found in the distributional characteristics of concessive and contrastivebut conjunctions.We have seen that metalinguistic uses of negationtend to occur in contrastiveenvironments,and the Englishrepresentation par excellence is but. One typical occurrenceof metalinguistic negationis in phrasesof the form not X but Y, functioning for many purposesas a single constituent. Y here is proposedmetalinguistically as the appropriate substitution (or, followingAnscombre& Ducrot, thatthe rejectedutterance RECTIFICATION) for X, on any grounds whatever;it is, as usual, irrelevant containingX may have expressed a true proposition. We often find that not X but Ymay be acceptablein frameswhere not X is not, as in Ala, oreven more clearly-in Alb: f?not three children. (Al) a. We have not three but four children. not three childrenbut four. *Not Lee [ Not Lee but Kim wonthe ace. A particularly strikingexampleof a metalinguistic negationwhich absolutelyrequiresits but rectificationappearsin ElizabethStone's explanation of why it is that, for Jessie-the protagonist of MarshaNorman'sPulitzer-winning play 'night,Mother-suicide countsas a positiveact expressing not despairbut autonomy: b
to die. (Ms., July 1983, 56) (A2) Not she chooses to DIE, but she CHOOSES
Note that, like 39a in the text, A2 representsa graphemiccontradictionif the negationis taken truth-functionally. Rectificationof metalinguistic negationcan be expressed in a variety of ways, as seen in the alternateforms of A3a-b: (A3) a. It isn't hot, but scalding. b. It isn't hot-it's scalding. c. #It isn't hot, but it's scalding. As in examples discussed in the text, hot is objected to on the groundsthat the predicationit yields, though true, is too weak. But the syntax of A3c forces an interpretation on which but functionsas a true sententialconnective (ratherthan a rectification),and negationfunctionsonly as an ordinarydescriptiveoperator. The reason A3c is pragmatically deviant(as signaledby the crosshatch)is that-given the fact that anythingscaldingis also (at least) hot-it is inconsistentto assertof anythingthatit is scalding on 'paradoxical the metalinguistic yet not hot (cf. Cormack negation',discussedin fn. 25). Similarly, of A4a (cf. ?2.3) disappearswith the unreducedsyntax of the but clause in A4b: interpretation We don't have three children{b-w have four} but four. b. #We don't have three children,but we (do) have four. When such sententialbut conjunctionsare acceptable(as descriptivenegations),they tend to be intonationcontour: interpretedas concessions, and assigneda characteristic (A4) a. (A5) a. We don't have three children,but we do have two. b. It isn't hot, but it is warm(#scalding). c. Negation isn't ambiguoussemantically,but it is pragmatically. The acceptabilitycontrastin A5b, or that between A5a and A4b, intuitivelyhinges on just what
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can count as a concession. The appearance of supportive do in what must be taken as an emphatic environment, and the heavy stress on the auxiliary, are additional linguistic correlates of the concessive but clause. My discussion of these two but constructions will lean heavily on the extremely insightful analysis of the cross-linguistic counterparts of these sentences given by Anscombre & Ducrot. They begin by pointing out that Spanish differentiates pero from sino, and German aber from sondern; but French contains just one surface connective mais. However, it enters into two distinguishable distributional patterns, corresponding to the PA (pero/aber) type and the SN (sino/sondern) type. Then, in the construction (A6) NEG-p SN q the negative must be syntactically overt and unincorporated, and the entire sequence must come from one speaker: no es consciente, sino totalmente automdtico. Eso (A7) Sp.: *es inconsciente, nicht bewusst, sondern ganz automatisch. Ger.: Das ist t *unbewusst, 'It is {not conscious / *unconscious} but (rather) totally automatic.' Here q is presented as the motivation for denying p and, crucially, SN-but is compatible with polemic (i.e. metalinguistic) negation. While the typical use of A6 directly follows a previous speaker's assertion of p, this is not a necessary condition on SN-but. Thus we can get the following, in both Spanish and German versions; (A8) X: Pierre is nice. Y: He's not just nice, SN quite generous. Here the object of Y's denial (he's just nice) hasn't actually been asserted, but is inferable via the 'loi d'exhaustivite'-Ducrot's version (1972), independently arrived at, of Grice's maxim of Quantity. However, the construction (A9) NEG-p PA q necessarily involves descriptive use of negation (i.e. when a negative is present; unlike SN, PA is not restricted to negative contexts). Here p and q must have the same 'argumentative orientation' on a given scale, and p must be 'argumentatively superior' to q. (Anscombre & Ducrot's argumentative scales, also expounded in Ducrot 1973, are similar to-but not identical with-the pragmatic scales of Horn 1972, 1978b, and of Fauconnier 1975.) Thus we get A10 but not All: No es cierto, pero es probable. (A10) Sp.: Ger.: Das ist nicht sicher, aber das ist wahrscheinlich. 'It's not certain, PA it is probable.' (All) Sp.: #No es probable, pero es cierto. Ger.: #Das ist nicht wahrscheinlich, aber das ist sicher. 'It's not probable, PA it is certain.' Though the SN vs. PA distinction is morphologically neutralized in French, Anscombre & Ducrot point out that certain diagnostics can be used to distinguish the two corresponding forms of mais. When mais = PA, we can add cependant, neanmoins, pourtant, en revanche, or par contre; when mais = SN, we can add au contraire or (in familiar style) meme que, or we can use paratactic syntax with no overt conjunction: (A12) Ce n'est pas certain, maispA c'est pourtant probable. (= A10) (A13) II n'est pa grand -il est tres grand. maissN tres grand. 'He isn't tall, SN very tall' When the SN-mais does occur overtly, however, its clause requires deletion (cf. 70 from Gross, and the English A4): (A 14) #11 n'est pas grand, mais il est tres grand.
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devianton the As we noted for the parallelEnglishexamplesA3c and A4b, A14 is pragmatically concessive (PA) readingof mais which forces the negationto be taken descriptively. Given that mais clauses with seulement(like but clauses with only orjust) force the SN interwith lexicalized(incorporated) negation(cf. A7): pretation,they are incompatible
(A15) a. II n'est pas intelligent, mais seulement bucheur. b. #I1 est inintelligent, mais seulement bucheur.
'He is ab.unintelligent j butjust a grind.' [b. unintelligent'J The failureof SN-butto co-occurwith incorporated of the observation(cf. negationis reminiscent Horn 1972and ?2.4 above) that metalinguistic negationdoes not incorporate prefixallyin English; cf. the examples in 35b above. Since non (pas) can be read only as metalinguistic negation(cf. Gross and ?4.2), it can occur only in environmentswhich otherwisepermitSN (ratherthan forcingPA) readingsof mais:
(A16) a. b. (A17) a. II n'est pas francais mais il est beige.
'He isn't French, butpA he is Belgian.'

II est non pas francais mais (*il est) belge.
'He is not FrenchbutsNBelgian.'

C'est non seulement vraisemblable, mais certain.
'It's not just likely butsNcertain.'

b. *C'est non pas certain mais reste possible.
'It's not certainbutsNremainspossible.' sentences are ruledout becausethe metalinguistic The ungrammatical nonpas negationforces the SN reading,which the context excludes. Finally, Anscombre& Ducrotshow that -p SN q constitutesa single speech act, while -p PA The metaq representstwo speech acts which may be associatedwith two separateinterlocutors. linguisticnegationnon (pas) requiresthe rectificationof the offendingitem p by the affirmative with PA-mais. statementq withinthe same speech act, and is thus incompatible In general,Anscombre& Ducrot'sanalysiscarriesover remarkably well to concessive (PA)and contrastive(SN) but clauses in English. Exx. Ala-b, A2, A3a-b, and A4a all illustrateSN-but in English, while A5 must be read as PA-but. Like the unacceptableSpanish,German,and French in both sentences, the crosshatchedcases of A3c, A4b, andA5b are simultaneously disambiguated directions (by their syntax and/orcontext of utterance),and hence can be neither PA nor SN. distinction English,of course, is on the Frenchside of the isogloss, wherethe overt morphological between PA and SN forms found in Spanishand Germanis neutralized. The concessive PA examples are worth exploringa bit more closely. Ex. A5 exemplifiesthe usual pattern:two scalartermsarejuxtaposedin the constructionNEG-p PA q, withp taken to be a strongerelement than q on a given scale. In the clear cases, such scales can be defined by unilateralentailment: four is strongerthan three because any simplepositive propositionwith the scalarelementfour entailsthe corresponding propositionwith three, but not vice versa. The scale containingscalding, hot, and warm which is implicitlyevoked in A3 and A5b can be similarly constructed. In each case, the use of the weaker scalar term conversationallyimplicatesthat (for all the speakerknows) no strongerterm on the same scale could be substitutedsalva veritate(cf. ?2.3). Additionallinguisticcorrelatescan be found for the existence of these scales, as illustratedby these constructions: (A18) not only X but Y not even X, {let alone / much less} Y X, (or) indeed Y at least X and possibly even Y X if not (downright) Y (where Y exceeds X on some relevantscale) But the notion of scale which is relevant for these constructionsis wider than entailmentcan accommodate.The entailmentcases are special instances of what is more broadlya pragmatic
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relation, defined as much by knowledgeand beliefs about the world sharedby the speech participants as it is by the languageitself (cf. Horn 1972,Ducrot 1972, 1973, Fauconnier1975). and ill-formedconcessive (PA) but conjuncConsiderthese additional examplesof well-formed tions: (A19) a. I don't have my master'sdegree, but I DOhave my {bachelor's/#doctorate}. I DID spend a few years there. b. I wasn't born in L.A., but #I was born in New York. (rather)in New York. [SN but] c. Of course it isn't cotton-but it is cottony soft. [Cottonelle] 1 rich/presentable. a Catholic/ a linguist. (A20) He isn't handsome,but he IS #ugly/?#mean. J In the well-formedconcessive examplesin A19, it is straightforward to constructa scale on which the negated element outranksthe item being affirmed.In A20, however, the concessive pattern expands to admita case in which the two elementsdo not standin an obvious scalarrelation,but where they do occur as fellow membersof an implicitlyinvoked set of attributes.The examples in A20 mightbe paraphrased as, e.g., (A20') He isn't handsomeAND rich, but (at least) he is rich. (In the same way, (a")in fn. 26 may be read concessively as 'She isn't pretty and intelligent,but at least she's intelligent.') The one case which stronglyresists acceptability is that where the affirmation of the latteritem, with the negationof the former,p, either (as in A4b or A5b) because it q, is judged incompatible is a STRONGERratherthan WEAKERitem on the same scale, or (as in A20) because it is just too to constructthe set of which the two items in questionfunctionas fellow members mind-boggling (e.g. the set of attributescontaininghandsome and mean). Considerthis unlikely, but actually attested, instance: (A21) Tippingis not so common in Nepal. Tippingis not compulsorybut it is obligatory. ('Nepal travelcompanion',by S. D. Bista & Y. R. Satyal, cited in the New Yorker, 7/19/82) Even here, we infer that the writers(if they were not totally confused)were assuminga scale on which compulsoryoutranksobligatory-i.e. where anythingcompulsoryis automatically obligatory, but not vice versa. In fact, however, even the apparently deviant #-markedexamplescan be renderedacceptable when ingenuitypermitsconstructionof the relevantpragmaticscale. Suppose that you have announcedthatyou are lookingfor peoplewiththreechildren(to fill out a questionnaire, for example, or to offer aid and solace); then, if I assume that havingfour childrenqualifiesme almost as well (or even better), I can nominatemyself by utteringthe suddenlyredeemedA4b. Abbott 1972, citing some unpublished observationsof CharlesFillmore, discusses this set of examples: John was born not in Boston, but in Philadelphia. (A22) a. b. #John was born in Philadelphia, but not in Boston. c. (#)John wasn't born in Boston, but he was born in Philadelphia. While A22a is good on what we've been callingthe SN reading,the syntax of A22b-c forces the PA interpretation: the formerbecause its first clause lacks negation, and the latter because its second clause is unreducedand containsan overt conjunction.As both Fillmoreand Abbottnote, A22b suggests the (unsatisfiable) expectationthatJohncould have been bornboth in Philadelphia and in Boston, while A22c seems to have 'an associatedassumptionthatthereis a scale connected with places to be born in, and that Boston representsa more extreme point on that scale than Philadelphia' (Abbott, 19). For me, one context which rendersA22c acceptableby commissioning the constructionof just such a scale is the following:a castingdirectorfor a school play in a small town in Iowa or Mississippi,needinga fifth-grader to portrayJFK in a forthcomingproduction, is being convinced to settle for John. If eitherthe non-focusedmaterialhe was bornor the conjunctionbutitself is deletedfromA22c,
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we obtain the SN readingwhich, as in A22a, is acceptablewithoutany special context: (A22') John wasn't born in Boston, {but/ he was born}in Philadelphia. Crucially,auxiliarynegationallows both the PA reading(as in A22c) and the SN reading(as in ('constituent')neA22'), dependingon the syntax of the second clause. However, post-auxiliary (like non (pas) in French, which also immediately gation can only be taken metalinguistically with the concessive PA reading.Thus, while precedesits focus or target),andis thus incompatible A22c is the PA version of A22', the latter's post-auxiliary-negated A22a has no acparaphrase ceptable PA counterpart: (A22")*Johnwas born not in Boston, but he was born in Philadelphia. These Englishfacts parallelthe FrenchexamplesfromAnscombre& Ducrot, viz. A16-17 above. As seen in the discussion of A4, the requisitepragmaticscale may force an inversion of the scale involvingthe same elements. Thus too, ordinarysemantically-based (entailment-generated) the #-marked version of A19a becomes acceptable if the speaker feels that the interlocutoris a master's. Simlooking, essentially,for someonewith a graduate degree, ratherthan particularly ilarly, A23 in isolation seems implausible,since it alludes to a scale on which being a private outranksbeing a corporal. (A23) #He isn't a private,but he is a corporal. Yet just such a scale CAN be constructed,if the context is fleshed out in the rightway: the Colonel has orderedthe Lieutenantto find a privateto blamethat last missionon. The Lieutenantreports back to the Colonel: (A23') I've found a soldier we can volunteerfor that mission, sir. He isn't a private, but he is a corporal.Will he do? Note that in this same context, the scalartermsalmost, barely,not even etc. reverse theirnormal distribution,helpingto confirmthis ad-hoc inversionof the standardscale: (A23")He's almost a private. Inspection seems to indicatethat similarunusual(if not outlandish)contexts can be constructed to redeem the unacceptablePA examplesfrom Anscombre& Ducrot, e.g. A1la-b above. The English examples discussed in this Appendixare consistent with Anscombre& Ducrot's thesis that the negation(optionally) figuringin the concessive PA-butconstructionsis necessarily descriptive, while the negative requiredby the SN contexts may be either descriptiveor (more Thus the contrastbetween the SN and PA types of but constructions, frequently)metalinguistic. in languageslike Frenchand English-as well as (if more subtly than) in languageslike Spanish and German-constitutes anotherdiagnosticfor metalinguistic vs. descriptiveuses of negation.28 REFERENCES BARBARA. 1972. The conjunction but. University of California, Berkeley, MS. ABBOTT, JENS.1977. Negation and the strength of presuppositions. Logic, pragmatics, ALLWOOD, and grammar, ed. by Osten Dahl et al., 11-57. Goteborg: University of Goteborg, Dept. of Linguistics. and OSWALD DUCROT. 1977. Deux mais en francais? Lingua ANSCOMBRE, JEAN-CLAUDE, 43.23-40. ATLAS,JAY DAVID. 1974. Presupposition, ambiguity, and generality: A coda to the Russell-Strawson debate on referring. Pomona, MS.
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METALINGUISTIC NEGATION AND PRAGMATIC AMBIGUITY

LANGUAGE, VOLUME 61, NUMBER 1 (1985)

METALINGUISTIC NEGATION AND PRAGMATIC AMBIGUITY

1.1. THE AMBIGUIST LINE. For most recent proponents-and

LANGUAGE,VOLUME61, NUMBER 1 (1985)

AMBIGUITY METALINGUISTIC NEGATIONAND PRAGMATIC

LANGUAGE, VOLUME 61, NUMBER 1 (1985)

NEGATIONAND PRAGMATIC AMBIGUITY METALINGUISTIC

LANGUAGE,VOLUME61, NUMBER 1 (1985)

Swahili similarlycontains several instances of suppletiveand redundantmarking for negation:

'I don't love you' vs. ha-tu-ku-pend-i

oguist thesis is incompatiblewith the defense of semantic presupposition.In6

METALINGUISTIC NEGATIONAND PRAGMATIC AMBIGUITY

to its ordinary negation,

of expressions (a) Make no contribution to TRUTH conditions, but constrain APPROPRIATENESS

with which they are associated.

(b) UNPREDICTABLE,arbitrary part of meaning;

NATURAL concomitant of what is said or

must be learnedad hoc.

either explicitly (by linguistic context) or implicitly(by extralinguistic context).

(d) DETACHABLE:two synonyms may have

NON-DETACHABLEif arising via one of the

content maxims(Quality,Quantity, Relation).

LANGUAGE, VOLUME 61, NUMBER 1 (1985)

AMBIGUITY NEGATIONAND PRAGMATIC METALINGUISTIC

seen in 15a: (15) a. ORDINARY NEGATION OF 4): (1

b. CONTRADICTIONNEGATION OF (): (-] [?eA4)i];

represents the truth-conditional meaning of <(, and b'

Smiley, Herzberger, Katz: Karttunen& Peters: Atlas, Boer & Lycan,

? 'ambiguists' yes no yes yes (as conven. implics.) yes yes

An analysis similarto K&P's is that in Ducrot 1972,to be by assigninga tautologicalimplicatum.

LANGUAGE, VOLUME 61, NUMBER 1 (1985)

METALINGUISTIC NEGATIONAND PRAGMATIC AMBIGUITY

broughtwithin the scope of negation:

LANGUAGE, VOLUME 61, NUMBER 1 (1985)

means for objecting to a previous utterance on any

METALINGUISTIC NEGATIONAND PRAGMATIC AMBIGUITY

LANGUAGE, VOLUME 61, NUMBER 1 (1985)

modals treats them as SEMANTICALLY (and possibly syntactically) ambiguous

METALINGUISTIC NEGATION AND PRAGMATIC AMBIGUITY

objection to this claim as follows (V:9):

LANGUAGE,VOLUME61, NUMBER 1 (1985)

METALINGUISTIC NEGATION AND PRAGMATIC AMBIGUITY

LANGUAGE, VOLUME 61, NUMBER 1 (1985)

not interesting but f

METALINGUISTIC NEGATION AND PRAGMATIC AMBIGUITY

Maggie isn't EITHERpatriotic OR quixotic-she's

LANGUAGE, VOLUME 61, NUMBER 1 (1985)

METALINGUISTIC NEGATION AND PRAGMATIC AMBIGUITY

LANGUAGE, VOLUME 61, NUMBER 1 (1985)

METALINGUISTIC NEGATION AND PRAGMATIC AMBIGUITY

LANGUAGE, VOLUME 61, NUMBER 1 (1985)

and their correspondentscross-linguistically-is a poor guide at best as to

17 Evidence for the view that conjunctions like

NEGATIONAND PRAGMATIC METALINGUISTIC AMBIGUITY

LANGUAGE,VOLUME61, NUMBER 1 (1985)

meaning from SENTENCE meaning.'9

(a') How does it FEELto be a beautifulgirl? Addresseeis a beautifulgirl.] [pragmatic presupposition:

[no pragmatic presupposition necessary.]

METALINGUISTIC NEGATION AND PRAGMATIC AMBIGUITY

LANGUAGE, VOLUME 61, NUMBER 1 (1985)

METALINGUISTIC NEGATIONAND PRAGMATIC AMBIGUITY