An Adaptation-based Pragmantactic Approach To Transferred Negation

Negation is an important way of sentence processing. As a linguistic universal, it exists in all languages. However, in terms of means of negating, negation may be language-specific. In English, the phenomenon that a negative word or element moves out of its original position to a new place had existed long before it was definitely defined as "transferred negation" by Quirk et al in 1972. Transferred negation was then specifically referred to as the transfer of the negative word from the subordinate clause (generally a that-clause). where semantically it belongs, to the matrix clause. The construction of "I don't think..." is the most typical example of transferred negation (TN, in contrast with direct negative, DN) and also it is what the present study is interested in. Broadly and deeply as this issue has been discussed, however, previous studies are mainly concerned with the construction itself as well as its linguistic characteristics, thus ignoring the pragmatic value and functions that the construction bears in actual communication. Therefore, this study attempts to investigate this syntactic issue from a new perspective—a pragmantactic approach.The present pragmantactic study on TN, namely, this syntactic issue being discussed from the perspective of pragmatics, is theoretically based on Verschueren's adaptation theory, which gets fully developed in the book Understanding Pragmatics (1999). In Verschueren's terms, pragmatics is a functional perspective concerning various levels of language use. with social, cultural and cognitive factors taken into consideration. Language use is actually a process of choice-making, consciously or unconsciously, for language-internal or language-external reasons. Any linguistic choice is the product of adaptation performed by language users through linguistic variability and negotiability. The use of TN is no exception. As a result of syntactic variation at the TN-DN level, TN embodies transformational rules of syntax, which transforms DN into TN through syntactic movement of not-transfer. Also the variability finds expressions in the intra-TN type, which is realized in the form of TN-variants. At the same time TN reflects linguistic negotiability in that grammar does not stipulate when to choose TN instead of DN and when to choose one exact...