A Pragmatic Analysis On Pragmatic Negation

Pragmatics Negation (PN) in this paper is the so called Metalinguistic Negation which can be found in many languages, and it seems that PN of different languages are common in both their negated contents and their forms, so this paper is mainly based on PN examples from English and Chinese. Different from Semantic Negation, which is also described as internal negation or truth-functional negation, PN is indeed a kind of marked negation or external negation which is an objection of the former utterance. PN has a variety of"negated objective"such as implicature, style, presupposition, pronunciation and so on. The former studies on PN are mainly about the semantic and cognitive analysis, and few researchers would take the pragmatic perspective to study PN, so they failed to take the communicators into account and can't answer questions concerning the inference of PN. According to the three main pragmatic theories including Cooperative Principle, Relevance Theory and Adaptation Theory, this paper deals with the pragmatic analysis of PN under a newly proposed theoretical framework—Cooperative-Relevance-Adaptation Model. And the features, the decoding process and the pragmatic effects of PN are also discussed in this paper.The present paper consists of five chapters. The following are the main points of each chapter.Chapter one is a general review of PN which points out that PN is a kind of external negation and marked negation, we can mainly divide PN into five categories according to its markedness.In chapter two, on the basis of the former studies on PN, the present study focuses on the restrictive factors of PN. By adopting the Relevance-Theoretic notion of"Metarepresentation", the paper researches the features of PN.Chapter three and chapter four are the main body of this paper. Chapter three discusses the use of Cooperative principle, Relevance Theory and Adaptation Theory on PN. First, different conversational implicatures are produced in PN by violating the four principles of Cooperative Principle, which are Quantity Maxim, Quality Maxim, Relevant Maxim and Manner Maxim. The use of Relevance Theory is much related to two aspects, one is the maximization of relevance, and the other is the decoding process. In the use of Adaptation Theory, the communicators must have contextual adaptation in the use of PN.Chapter four uses Cooperative-Relevance-Adaptation Model in the analysis of PN. In this chapter, we adopt a more comprehensive perspective on the communicative model which combines the three pragmatic theories together. The framework of this new model is that on the basis of cooperation, the purpose of communication for both speaker and hearer is to seek relevance, in which a dynamic adaptation is used. At last, the paper also discusses the pragmatic effects of PN.Finally, chapter five is the concluding remarks which sum up the main points of the whole paper.