A Cognitive And Pragmatic Account Of Metalinguistic Negation

This dissertation is intended to examine the nature of metalinguistic negation and its interpretation. The former involves two aspects, that is, the nature of negation operator and the nature of material falling in the scope of negation. As far as the nature of negation operator is concerned, contrary to Horn (1985), we agree with Carston (1996) on that the negation operator in cases of metalinguistic negation is exactly the same one as that in cases of descriptive negation:i.e. the standard truth-functional negation. The difference between the two possible interpretations of negative utterances lies with the way in which the material falling in the scope of the negation operator is being used:either it is descriptively used to represent states on the world or echoically used in the sense of Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995).We have investigated four languages which are claimed to have exclusive operators of metalinguistic negation, and found them nothing but markers of ordinary pragmatic functions, such as focus markers, metarepresentation markers, contrastive markers, etc., which means there is no metalinguistic negation operator at all, and the negation operator in metalinguistic negation is no other than the standard truth-functional operator of negation.Although Carston's implicit echoic analysis shed much light on the nature of metalinguistic negation, the notion of echo needs to be elaborated. In view of this, we have discussed the origin of echo, the pragmatic nature of metalinguistic negation and its cognitive nature as well. We consider metalinguistic negation as a kind of "double-voiced discourse", and thereby, the origin of echo, as an implicit other's voice, is the prerequisite of echo. By using an echoic expression, the addresser intends the addressee to select from its multiple ostensions something other than the customary referent (either instead of it or in addition to it), which is also the object of negation. As a foregrounding mechanism, the echoic expression can reverse figure/ground segregation, and therefore, it is the ground that is the object of metalinguistic negation.We should bear it in mind that when we consider the interpretation of metalinguistic negation as an integrated process, it involves three aspects:(1) the identification of a discourse as metalinguistic negation (the process of recognizing metalinguistic negation as a type), (2) the determination of its intended meaning (the interpretation of its value), and (3) the effects achieved by metalinguistic negation (its pragmatic functions).The identification of metalinguistic negation relies heavily on context, which requires classification of the contextual information and assessment of the influence of the context concerned. Metalinguistic negation doesn't have a conceptual meaning but rather only a procedural one, so we describe the successive cognitive states of an addressee when a metalinguistic negation utterance is processed to catch the procedural meaning of it. A comparison of the negated clause with the correcting clause leads to the determination of what is exactly negated. By metalinguistic negation, we achieve the pragmatic effects of correcting, humor, emphasizing, transiting of discoursive power, and establishing solidarity, etc..