Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

There is a tendency to understand negation broadly, although there are a variety of negative

utterances that have specific ways of configuration and contribute differently to the process of

meaning derivation. One illustration of the multiple interpretations negation can have is the

dichotomy between 'descriptive negation vs. metalinguistic negation' (Carston 1996, 1999, Ducrot

1972, 1984, Horn 1985, 2001, Moeschler 1993, 1997, 2010, to name but a few). Starting from the

relevance-theoretic account (Sperber and Wilson 1995, Carston 2002), I distinguish between

metarepresentational negation (MetNeg) and descriptive negation (DN), based on the premise that

they represent two different ways in which information is configured at the mental level.

 

The aim of this presentation is to offer a comprehensive account of descriptive negation with

an emphasis on its configuration in natural language. The configuration of DN refers to its mental

representation in terms of generated inferences and derived cognitive effects. This contributes to a

better understanding of the cognitive processes, of the relations between categories of interpretation

and of the recognition of how interpretations are produced and identified. The hypothesis I postulate

is that DN is the 'description of a negative content', leading to the generation of the cognitive effect

represented by 'the derivation of new contextual implications', in contrast with MetNeg which is the

outcome of an input processed in a context in which a ‘contradicting and eliminating an existing

assumption’ cognitive effect is derived, i.e. some existing assumptions are rejected and a new set of

assumptions is suggested. This implies that the derivation and interpretation of DN is related to the

architecture of the human mind, representing a complex mental category that manipulates

information in a particular way, i.e. the absence of some events or states.

 

The corpus of data on which this study relies is represented by authentic Romanian and

English political discourses. The presentation is a linguistic contribution situated in the subfield of

cognitive pragmatics and the approach uses mainly the tools and methods provided by Relevance

Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995).