A Cognitive Analysis Of Metalinguistic Negation

Delimiting the field of negation is a difficult task. The discussions relating it have ranged from the morphological aspects of negation, to the syntax, the semantics and the pragmatics. In this paper I do not intend to provide an exhaustive discussion of all the aspects of negation which were, at one moment or another, prominent issues in the linguistics literature. Instead, I will restrict my discussions to a cognitive study of metalinguistic negation, a special kind of negation. What I hope to achieve in this paper is some rather deeper understanding of the semantic, pragmatic properties of utterances which are said to involve the phenomenon of metalinguistic negation, and its working mechanism and nature from the communicators'perspective. Such special linguistic phenomenon as MN, a marked negation, a negation of felicity conditions, which is traditionally assumed as a non-truth-functional use of negation, can be found in many languages.Basically, the traditional studies of MN are of the category of semantics. Researchers only concentrate on the MN forms, failing to take the communicators and context into account, so they can't satisfactorily answer questions concerning the nature and inference of MN, since contextual features influence a lot when we try to arrive at the implicature the utterance intends. It is known that everything is relatively true. This dialectic view is also true for the discussions and studies of linguistics. It is wise to see and analyze MN dialectically as it is. In this paper, Horn Scale, a most important notion, will be introduced and developed. It is applied to the cognitive analysis of MN. What's more, categorization, a cognitive linguistics notion, describes how people interpret the external and internal experiences. It has much to do with the definition of truth value. Traditionally the truth of a sentence was taken as a logical one while the speaker's and the hearer's interpretations and conceptions are taken no notice of. However, cognitive linguistics points out that the truth of a sentence can only be decided by human purposes and categorization of objects. That is, the category of an object is not a binary matter; instead, it is classified by the human purpose. MN is taken as a process of choosing and defining the right category to interpret the experience.The next step is to discuss the use of MN from the speaker's and the hearer's perspective respectively. During this process another important cognitive notion of linguistics is introduced: Idealised Cognitive Models. ICM is in fact the human knowledge representation which is stored in the brain. The speaker uses this notion to encode MN. In other word, he is choosing the proto-ICM, which refers to the ICM intentionally or subconsciously taken by people under a specific situation for the need of their present communication or comprehensions. The proto-ICM is not static, but changing with the changes of context and considered the most appropriate in the present context in the speaker's eye—the most representative one. Roughly speaking, cognitive models are the experienced and stored mental contexts for a certain field by an individual. MN occurs between two ICMs, while most other negations only occur within an ICM. For the hearer, he is supposed to decode the speaker's meaning. As human beings, they have common cognitive competence and similar ways to describe and interpret the world. For instance, image schemas of"up","down","in","out","over", etc. This provides the hearer with adequate evidence and confidence to decode the speaker's meaning. Actually the process of utterance interpretation is the process of constructing and choosing a proper context. Thus it involves two passes of decoding: failure of literal understanding of MN and seeking to construct a cognitive context in which its present use would be most appropriate. The hearer will do a reanalysis of MN after the failure understanding of it. He makes assumptions and then decides which one is more proper to the present need. Simultaneously its effects achieved on the hearer will be touched upon.