A Tentative Study Of Metalinguistic Negation

Negative expressions in natural languages play a weighty role in human communication, which has been the common concern of philosophers and linguists since Plato for more than two thousand years, and turn out to be so complicated that the traditional account proves ineffective for the description of negation in general. The development of pragmatics has made it possible to study negation from a new perspective, which has received increasing attention for two decades. It is American linguist Laurence Horn who laid a foundation for the study of metalinguistic negation and then led to heated discussions since.Metalinguistic negation is a specialized use of the negative operator where it functions as a device for registering an objection to a preceding utterance on any grounds other than its truth-conditional content. Metalinguistic negation is a witty linguistic device , which defends a proposition and represents a state of mind such as making an unexpected result or achieving humorous effects.The thesis contributes tentatively to the study of the pragmatic functions of metalinguistic negation on the basis of interpretation of its attributes in both English and Chinese, and integrates the theory of metalinguistic negation with practical application in foreign language education.