Blackwell Reference Online

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My goal here is to survey some recent proposals and results in the analysis of natural language negation within the assumptions of generative grammar and the project of applying formal semantic techniques to the interpretation of natural language structures. I have focussed on three areas: the semantics of clausal descriptive negation, the analysis of the limitations on the distribution of so-called negative polarity items, and the interpretation of negative concord structures. Fundamental to the semantics of negation is a notion of inconsistency. Negation is always rooted in an opposition between two elements which are inconsistent with each other. In terms of simple propositional logic, where formulas are assigned truth-values, this inconsistency is represented by the fact that a formula p and its negation ⌝ p cannot both be true. The essence of this weak sense of negation is expressed in the Law of Contradiction (⌝( p &⌝ p )). Though this truth-value based notion of negation is archetypal, the opposition of inconsistent elements is relevant to other domains as well. For example, properties may be opposed in this way, as nothing may be both possible and impossible, or both hot and cold. The same opposition may be given a pragmatic construal in terms of the felicitous assertability of a sentence and two sentences may be negatively opposed because they cannot both be felicitously ... log in or subscribe to read full text