Irregular Negations: Pragmatic Explicature Theories
I will examine negations that are “irregular” in that they are not used in accordance with standard logical rules. These include scalar-, metalinguistic-, specifying-, and evaluative-implicature denials; presupposition-canceling denials; and contrary affi
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Abstract I will examine negations that are ‘‘irregular’’ in that they are not used in accordance with standard logical rules. These include scalar-, metalinguistic-, specifying-, and evaluative-implicature denials; presupposition-canceling denials; and contrary affirmations. The principal questions are how their irregular interpretations are related to their regular interpretation, and whether their ambiguity is semantic or pragmatic. I argue here that pragmatic ‘‘explicature’’ (Carston) or ‘‘impliciture’’ (Bach) theories have few advantages over implicature theories (Grice, Horn, Burton-Roberts), and that clear examples of pragmatic explicatures involve indexicality or syntactic ellipsis, which are not involved in irregular negations. I argue against claims that any interpretation can be ‘‘pragmatically derived’’ using either Gricean or Relevance theory. With one class of exceptions, I argue for a semantic ambiguity thesis maintaining that irregular interpretations are idioms that plausibly evolved from generalized conversational implicatures. The exceptions are evaluative-implicature denials, which are still live implicatures.
1 Irregular Negations We will be focusing on negations as a species of sentence. The term ‘negation’ can also be used in different senses to denote a propositional operator, a proposition with that operator applied, or the speech act of asserting such a proposition. When regular, the form ‘Not-p’ stands for a sentence expressing the result of applying the negation operator to the proposition expressed by ‘p.’
W. A. Davis (&) Philosophy Department, Georgetown University, 20057 Washington, DC, USA e-mail: [email protected]
A. Capone et al. (eds.), Perspectives on Pragmatics and Philosophy, Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology 1, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-01011-3_14, Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013
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Horn (1989: 362–4; 370–5) observed that many negations have an ‘‘exceptional’’ interpretation. Six types have been identified.
(1) (a) The sun is not larger than some planets: it is larger than all planets (b) That’s not a tomäto: it’s a toma¯toa (c) Vulcan is not hot: it does not exist (d) The sky isn’t partly cloudy, it’s partly sunny (e) Mary did not meet a man at the bar, she met her husband (f) John does not believe there is a god, so he is an athiest a
Scalar-Implicature Denial Metalinguistic-Implicature Denial Presupposition-Canceling Denial Evaluative-Implicature Denial Specifying-Implicature Denial Contrary Affirmation
‘ä’ represents the vowel sound in ‘ah’ and ‘ma,’ ‘a¯’ the vowel sound in ‘pay’ and ‘ate’
If the negation clause in (1)(a)—(1)(a)n—had its regular (‘‘ordinary’’) interpretation, the conjunction as a whole would be contradictory. It would mean the sun is larger than no planets: it is larger than all planets. And if (1)(f)n were regular, the conclusion would not follow. These negations would more charitably be interpreted in these contexts as having the meanings of the negations in (2)1: (2) (a) The sun is not
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