Metalinguistic negation and pragmatic ambiguity

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Metalinguistic Negation and Pragmatic AmbiguityAuthor(s): Laurence R. HornSource: Language, Vol. 61, No. 1 (Mar., 1985), pp. 121-174Published by: Linguistic Society of AmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/413423Accessed: 25/01/2010 09:46

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METALINGUISTIC NEGATION AND PRAGMATIC AMBIGUITY

LAURENCE R. HORN

Yale University When 'marked' or 'external' negation has not been treated as an additional semantic

operator alongside the straightforward truth-functional, presupposition-preserving ordinary ('internal') negation, it has been collapsed with internal negation into a unified general logical operator on propositions. Neither of these approaches does justice to the differences and kinships between and within the two principal varieties of negation in natural language. Marked negation is not reducible to a truth-functional one-place connective with the familiar truth-table for negation, nor is it definable as a separate logical operator; it represents, rather, a metalinguistic device for registering objection to a previous utterance (not proposition) on any grounds whatever, including the way it was pronounced.*

INTRODUCTION

So-called 'external' or 'marked' negation is often exemplified by the reading of The King of France is not bald which is forced by the continuation ... because there is no King of France and which is true if France is a republic; by contrast, the 'internal' reading is either false or lacks truth value. The traditional account of external negation involves the recognition of a semantic ambiguity; this position is adopted, in somewhat different ways, by Frege 1892, by Russell 1905, by Karttunen & Peters 1979, and by proponents of three-valued logics. However, the major recent trend among philosophers and linguists represented by Atlas 1974, 1977, 1981, by Kempson 1975, and by Gazdar 1979a,b, has been to reject this putative ambiguity (along with the existence of truth-value gaps and semantic presuppositions) and to assimilate all instances of natural language negation to a single truth-functional operator.

Both views contain much insight and some truth, yet both are seriously flawed. While two distinct uses of natural language negation must indeed be admitted, the marked use must be treated not as a truth-functional or semantic operator on propositions, but rather as a device for objecting to a previous utterance on any grounds whatever-including its conventional or conversational implicata, its morphology, its style or register, or its phonetic realization.

In this paper, conceived as a more explicit formulation of some ideas inherent in Ducrot 1972, 1973, Grice 1967, Wilson 1975, and others, and buttressed by

* Parts of this paper were presented in a different form at the 1982 summer and winter meetings of the Linguistic Society of America, and at talks at Columbia and Cornell earlier in the same year. The seeds for the major thesis germinated at the July 1979 Colloquium on the Possibilities and Limitations of Pragmatics at Urbino, Italy, and subsequently developed through courses and sem- inars at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Yale. The members of these audiences, along with those who read and commented on earlier versions, are hereby collectively thanked, and of course absolved of all blame for the ways I may have used (and misused) their suggestions. I would like to single out for special thanks Barbara Abbott, Jay Atlas, Samuel Bayer, Seungja Choi, Benoit de Cornulier, Robin Cooper, David Dowty, Georgia Green, Anne Malcolm, Ewan Klein, William Lycan, David Odden, Jerry Sadock, Dennis Stampe, and Deirdre Wilson. Their contributions were not important-they were invaluable.

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LANGUAGE, VOLUME 61, NUMBER 1 (1985)

a variety of linguistic data correlating with the two uses of negation, I seek to focus on the descriptive/metalinguistic dichotomy as an instance of pragmatic ambiguity-a built-in duality of use wherein the descriptive meaning of negation motivates its extended function. I will discuss the relation of metalinguistic negation to truth-conditional semantics, and will argue that the traditional identification of external negation with the formula It is not true that ... is misleading at best. I also attempt to show that other logical operators (and, or, if-then, and wH-binding) display extended metalinguistic uses of their own; and I cast further doubt on theories which treat natural language negation as either semantically ambiguous or invariably truth-functional.

The outline of the paper is as follows. In ?1, some of the more influential accounts of negation are summarized and discussed: the AMBIGUIST approach of Russell, Strawson, and the three-valued logicians in ?1.1; the MONOGUIST

approach of Atlas, Kempson, and Gazdar in ?1.2; and the NEO-AMBIGUIST position of Karttunen & Peters in ?1.3. In ?2, I present evidence to support the position that negation must be taken as pragmatically ambiguous, with marked negation as an extended metalinguistic use of a basically truth-functional operator. In ?2.1, I argue that external, presupposition-canceling negation is part of a wider phenomenon characterized as the use of negation to signal the speaker's unwillingness to assert a given proposition in a given way-or, more generally, the speaker's objection to the content or form (phonetic, morphological, syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic) associated with a given utterance. In ?2.2, I discuss the two uses of negation (descriptive and metalinguistic) in terms of what they generally negate: truth (of a proposition) vs. assertability (of an utterance). In ?2.3, I focus on a characteristic use of metalinguistic negation as a means of removing the upper-bounding implicature associated with scalar predications (e.g. It isn't WARM, it's HOT); in ?2.4, I examine one correlate of the descriptive/metalinguistic dichotomy for English negation-the ability of descriptive (but not metalinguistic) negation to incorporate prefixally. The question of the interplay of truth, negation, and implicature is addressed in ?2.5, where I try to show that marked negation cannot be semantically analysed in terms of truth; attempts in this direction, where external negation is taken as approximately It is not TRUE that for some semantic predicate TRUE, founder on the distinction between the semantic notion of truth and the distributional behavior of the word true in ordinary language.

In ?3, I briefly discuss the extent to which other standard logical connectives and variable-binding operators may be seen as pragmatically ambiguous (like negation) between descriptive and metalinguistic uses. In ?4, I return to an examination of other recent approaches to the unity or duality of natural language negation which are closer in spirit to the view defended in ?2: in ?4.1, the monoguist positions of Allwood 1972, of Kempson, and of Atlas, and the neo-monoguist (or neo-ambiguist) theories of Bergmann, 1977, 1981, of Kart- tunen & Peters, and of Lehrer & Lehrer 1982; in ?4.2, the analysis of French negation in terms of a distinction between 'negation descriptive' and 'negation metalinguistique' (or 'polemique') in work by Ducrot and his colleagues; and in ?4.3, the treatment of negation advanced by Wilson, in many ways akin to

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that urged here. A summary of my findings, with a brief cross-linguistic ex- cursus, is given in ?5.

The Appendix presents an examination of two types of but clauses in English (with parallels in Spanish, German, and French) which interact significantly with the two uses of negation distinguished in the body of the paper. Following Anscombre & Ducrot 1977, I attempt to show that metalinguistic negation is compatible with only one of these subspecies of but clauses.

EXTERNAL NEGATION: SOME TRADITIONAL ACCOUNTS

1.1. THE AMBIGUIST LINE. For most recent proponents-and opponents-of the claim that natural language negation is semantically ambiguous, the causal chain stretches back at least to Frege and Russell. Aristotle and the Stoics may have held analogous views (cf. Bergmann 1977:65, Atlas 1981:125), but the evidence is unclear. Russell (485) formulated the essential puzzle with his characteristic style:

'By the law of the excluded middle, either "A is B" or "A is not B" must be true. Hence either "the present king of France is bald" or "the present king of France is not bald" must be true. Yet if we enumerated the things that are bald and the things that are not bald, we should not find the king of France on either list. Hegelians, who love a synthesis, will probably conclude that he wears a wig.'

This puzzle, Russell maintained, should be unraveled by the elimination of definite descriptions (e.g. the present king of France) from logical form, with the result that sentences like 1-2 are not of subject-predicate form, their syntax notwithstanding:

(1) The present king of France is bald. (1') 3x (Kx & Vy[Ky-,y=x] & Bx)

(2) The present king of France is not bald. (2') 3x (Kx & Vy[Ky-y=x] & -Bx) (2") -3x (Kx & Vy[Ky->y=x] & Bx)

If ex. 1 is unpacked into an existentially quantified conjunction, as in 1', its normal (or 'primary') negation consists in attaching the negative operator to the third conjunct, as shown in 2'. This INTERNALLY negated sentence was for Russell 'simply false' if there was no French king (or more than one of them). However, he acknowledged, there is a reading of 2 with 'secondary' negation which is true, given that France is a republic. It is this reading which requires attaching the negation sign EXTERNALLY to the entire logical form 1', resulting in 2" above.

Despite the importance of Russell's analysis, the treatment of negation as semantically ambiguous came to be linked historically with the treatment of logical (or semantic) presupposition in anti-Russellian theories of definite descriptions. While the relation of presupposition obtaining between propositions can be traced back to Peter of Spain, whose 12th century Treatise on exponibles employed the verb praesupponere in approximately the modern sense (cf. Mul- lally 1945), it was Frege who introduced modern philosophers to the problems of presupposition and reference failure for names and descriptions. In his classic paper on sense and reference, Frege (1892:40) argued that both 3a and its (ordinary) negation 3b PRESUPPOSE (voraussetzen) that the name Kepler des-

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ignates something: (3) a. Kepler died in misery.

b. Kepler did not die in misery. c. Kepler did not die in misery, or the name Kepler has no reference.

To detach this presupposition, Frege claimed, the negation of 3a would have had to be not 3b, but 3c. While he did not pursue this possibility, it should be noted that Frege seems to have prefigured the later emergence of a presupposition-canceling external negation whose truth conditions are equivalent to those of disjunctions like 3c.

It was, however, with Strawson's re-introduction of neo-Fregean presuppositions, and the truth-value gaps resulting from their non-satisfaction, that the semantic ambiguity of negation came into its heyday. For Strawson 1950, someone who uttered ex. 1 did commit himself to the existence of a (unique) French king, but did not ASSERT (nor does his statement ENTAIL) the existential proposition that there is a king of France. In case this existential proposition failed, Strawson maintained, ex. 1 would be judged neither true nor false. A statement was indeed made under such circumstances (pace Frege 1892), but the question of its truth value 'fails to arise'.

While Strawson himself was skeptical of using any version of formal logic to express his intuitions about truth and meaning in natural language,' logicians before him like Lukasiewicz 1930, Kleene 1938, and Bochvar 1939-and philosophers and linguists since, including Smiley 1960, van Fraassen 1966, Keenan 1971, Herzberger 1973, Katz 1977, and Martin 1979, 1981-have proposed varieties of three-valued logics in which truth-value gaps arise, i.e. in which meaningful declarative statements can be made which in at least some contexts are assigned neither of the classical values T or F.

It is generally accepted within these models that ordinary negation preserves (non-)bivalence: if and only if a statement is non-bivalent (neither true nor false) in a given context, its ordinary negation will likewise be non-bivalent. This is shown in the second column of Table 1, the standard truth table for negation, where N stands for the neuter, non-bivalent, or non-designated value. But if the three-valued logician agrees with Strawson that ex. 1 and its ordinary negation 2-read as in 2', as asserting hirsuteness of the French monarch-share non-bivalence when their shared existential presupposition fails,2 what of the

1 The last sentence of Strawson's manifesto reads: 'Neither Aristotelian nor Russellian rules give the exact logic of any expression of ordinary language; for ordinary language has no exact logic.' Kempson (1975:86) has pointed out the irony of this conclusion, which contains a definite description without inducing an existential presupposition. In Strawson's later work, only descriptions in subject position induce presuppositions (and incur truth-value gaps when reference fails).

2 Horn 1972 (Chap. 1) argues that the failure of the uniqueness presupposition is a somewhat different matter; as noted there, the external negation operator which can be used to cancel existence (as we have seen) cannot easily cancel uniqueness:

(a) ?*The king of France isn't bald-there are two kings of France. (b) ?*It is not the case that the California senator is bald-there are two California senators.

This problem involves the pragmatics of definite reference (cf. Hawkins 1978); such matters will not be addressed here.

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, _ internal, choice, primary negation P -P P-external, exclusion, secondary negation

T F F F T T N N T

TABLE 1.

reading specified by Russell's 2", which is apparently true in such a context? This is the sense in which we can say the following:

(4) The king of France isn't bald-there ISN'T any king of France.

One possibility is to assume a second negation operator which is assigned the truth values shown in the third column of Table 1. The traditional labels for the two negations thus distinguished are INTERNAL and EXTERNAL, although other terms (as shown) have been employed.

Alternatively, some presuppositionalists have held that negation is not in effect LEXICALLY ambiguous between the two senses depicted in Table 1, but SCOPALLY ambiguous as to its position in logical syntax (as it was within Rus- sell's non-presuppositional two-valued logic). It has often been observed that the external reading of negation is more natural or accessible when the form of the negative statement is not as in 2-even when fleshed out in the manner of 4-but rather as in the following:

(5) It is not true that the king of France is bald. (6) It is not the case that the king of France is bald.

Arguing from this observation, Smiley, Herzberger, and others have suggested that we first introduce a one-place connective t, on the model of the Bochvar- Frege horizontal, to be interpreted as 'It is true that ...' Such a connective will always yield a bivalent truth value for t(P), given any meaningful statement

(bivalent or non-bivalent) P. Now, while it may or may not be FALSE that the

king of France is bald when France has no king, it is certainly NOT TRUE that the (non-existent) king is bald. Thus a negation outside the scope of the truth

operator will always yield the opposite bivalent value of that assigned to t(P), as shown in Table 2.

P t(P) -t(P) T T F F F T N F T

TABLE 2.

We thus obtain the assignments we had for the external negation operator defined above; note the identity between the rightmost columns in Tables 1 and 2. Indeed, as Keenan and others have observed, we could now define a derived external negation operator as in 7, rather than taking P to be a primitive of the logic:

(7) P =df ~t(P)

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However the differences between these approaches are to be resolved, the existence of marked negative statements which are true when their affirmative counterparts are neither true nor false has led proponents of semantic presupposition to conclude that natural language negation must be represented as ambiguous, either by allowing dual interpretations of a single surface operator or by providing dual scope possibilities for negation in logical form. A system- atic ambiguity for negation figures crucially in ALL theories which admit semantic presuppositions-but (as Russell illustrated) not ONLY in these. As Thomason 1973 has observed, unless negation is treated as semantically ambiguous, 'it's not clear that the semantic notion of presupposition can be defended at all'.3

The ambiguist position on negation has been supported recently by Martin 1979, 1981-who acknowledges, in the course of his defense of semantic presupposition (1979:43), that know and other factives may have to be taken as semantically ambiguous:

'Methodologically, of course, the multiplication of senses beyond necessity is undesirable ... but a few such ambiguities, especially that of negation, seem perfectly reasonable.'

1.2. THE MONOGUIST LINE. The chief difficulty for the ambiguist view of negation sketched above is that it is by no means obvious, nor is it easily de- monstrable, that negative sentences like 2 ARE semantically ambiguous. Fur- thermore, as pointed out by Atlas 1974, the periphrastic constructions of 5-6 do not clearly disambiguate 2 in favor of the presupposition-free 'external' reading, except within a readily definable subset of philosophers and linguists.

Within the last decade, a countervailing consensus in opposition to the ambiguist line has emerged from the work of Allwood, of Atlas, of Kempson 1975, of Boer & Lycan 1976, and of Gazdar. Where Russell struggled with diligence and care to untie the Gordian knot constructed by the king of France, these monoguists-wielding Occam's razor like a samurai sword-seek to sever it with one blow; for them, negation is simply not ambiguous, in either meaning or scope. The burden of proof is clearly on the ambiguist (as the defensive tone of Martin's passage seems to concede); like other abstract entities, senses must not be multiplied beyond necessity. Grice (1978:118-19) calls this the 'Modified Occam's Razor principle', and Ziff (1960:44) advances the same doctrine as 'Occam's eraser'.

It is, moreover, exceptionally difficult to PROVE that the presupposition-car- rying internal understanding and the presupposition-free external understanding of 2 are semantically distinct, given that the former unilaterally entails the latter: if the existent king of France is non-bald, it is certainly not the case that the present king of France is bald. What the ambiguist must demonstrate between internal and external readings is a PRIVATIVE ambiguity, of the sort

3 The ambiguist/monoguist opposition comes from Wertheimer 1972, who applies the terms to two rival theories of the semantics of modals (cf. ?2.1 below). The statement in the text is a bit oversimplified, since van Fraassen (1966 and subsequent work) has elaborated a theory of 'su- pervaluations' in which logical presupposition is not defined in terms of the internal negation operator, and does not crucially depend on the ambiguity of negation. Nevertheless, van Fraassen does figure in the ranks of the ambiguists (cf. Martin 1981 for related discussion).

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claimed to hold for such examples as these:

occ-canis familiaris (8) a. I just bought a new dog. canis familaris, canis familiaris, male

.Each of them is married. b. Kim and Lee are married They are married to each other.

Yet, as Zwicky & Sadock 1975 have shown, it is just such ambiguities which are the hardest to substantiate by linguistic tests.4

For the linguist, a particularly telling argument against the ambiguist position is the fact (noted by Gazdar 1979a:65-6) that no natural language seems to employ two distinct negative operators which function like the two logical operators in Table 1.5 This is especially striking when one considers the many instances in which a language does contain two or more negative markers. In particular, as exemplified in Table 3, many languages draw an opposition be-

UNMARKED MARKED (EMPHATIC)

NEGATION NEGATION

Ancient Greek ou me Modern Greek 6en (< ou6en) mi Latin non ne Modem Irish nach gan Estonian ei mitte

Tagalog hindi huwag TABLE 3.

4 I do not mean to imply that cases like 8a-b are not truly ambiguous; it is just that their ambiguity (if any) is difficult to prove via the standard elliptical 'identity of sense' transformations which block 'crossed readings' in the case of non-privative ambiguities:

(a) Tracy left a deposit at the bank, and so did Lee. (b) Ralph saw her duck, {and I did too / but I didn't}.

As Zwicky & Sadock note, the existence of crossed readings in cases of privative ambiguities cannot in principle be determined, since the more inclusive understanding will always be available (Atlas 1977 to the contrary notwithstanding):

(c) Ron and Nancy are married, and so are Dick and Jimmy. (d) Fido is a dog, and so is Queenie.

Thus, contrary to the claims of Atlas 1977 and Kempson (1975:99-100), the acceptability of (e) has no bearing on the purported ambiguity of negation:

(e) The king of France is not bald, and neither is the queen of England. Here both conjuncts permit the more inclusive 'external' understanding (cf. Horn 1984 for related discussion).

Martin (1981:23-6) notes that the semantic ambiguity test classically employed by philosophers is based on whether a given sentence can be judged simultaneously true and false relative to the same possible world, context, or state of affairs (cf. Quine 1960:27 on the ambiguity of light; cf. also Kempson 1982). This criterion is rejected by Zwicky & Sadock for reasons Martin finds insufficient; in any event, such privative ambiguities as 8b do come out simultaneously true and false with respect to the state of affairs described in the recent country song title, 'When you're married, but not to each other'. And in the world of 1905 or today, Russell's classic negative sentence 2 may well be judged simultaneously TRUE and-depending on one's semantic persua- sions-either FALSE or non-bivalent (i.e. not true, in any case). The force of the objection by Atlas and others to an ambiguous negation operator is thus weakened, coming to rest finally on the general metatheoretical desideratum of parsimony, rather than on any specific empirical claim about natural language ambiguity.

5 Some apparent counter-examples to this claim will be discussed below.

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tween an unmarked declarative negation and a marked form (often labeled 'emphatic') which is restricted to embedded non-finite and/or non-indicative contexts, frequently co-occurring with subjunctive mood.6

In French, negation can be marked in at least half a dozen morphologically distinct ways, depending on the syntactic environment and the semantic context (cf. Gaatone 1971, Heldner 1981):

(9) (ne) ... paslpointlaucunlpersonnelrienljamais non (pas) + ADV

Swahili similarly contains several instances of suppletive and redundant marking for negation:

(10) ni-na-ku-pend-a vs. si-ku-pend-i I-PRES-yOUsg-love-INDIC I- NEG I

'I love you' 'I don't love you' tu-na-ku-pend-a vs. ha-tu-ku-pend-i

NEG -

'we love you' 'we don't love you' Languages, then, may utilize morphologically differentiated negative forms

for syntactic, semantic, or even arbitrary reasons, but-significantly-never to mark the one distinction which Russell and the three-valued ambiguists would lead us to expect.

It might be held that the external reading of negation need not display a separate morphological coding, since it will be associated with the occurrence of true within its scope, as suggested in the earlier discussion (cf. ex. 7). Thus Karttunen & Peters (1979:47) propose that 'the "external" negation of ( ... might be rendered into English as "It is not true that (."' But this approach is on shaky ground, given that the occurrence of the English formula It is not true that (or It is not the case that) is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the emergence of a non-presuppositional understanding of a negative sentence-as Atlas, Kempson, and others have pointed out. A semantic theory which invokes an abstract truth predicate (TRUE, as in Linebarger 1981) at either the object-language or metalanguage level, as a kind of 'animus ex machina' for just those sentences where negation seems to be behaving externally, is as unconvincing as a syntactic theory which invokes phonologically and semantically null inaudibilia without providing solid motivation for the existence of such constructs.

Another equally fundamental problem for the utilization of a truth predicate in the representation of external negation is the fact (to be explored in more detail in ?2.5 below) that the function of TRUE as a metalinguistic operator in a truth-conditional semantic theory cannot be directly assimilated to the behavior of true in ordinary English (or its cross-linguistic counterparts), apart from the treatment of negation.

1.3. THE KARTTUNEN & PETERS ANALYSIS. As mentioned above, the monoguist thesis is incompatible with the defense of semantic presupposition. In-

6 One reason for the existence of this particular dichotomy is discussed in Horn 1978a (?5).

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deed, monoguists like Atlas, Kempson, Boer & Lycan, and Gazdar have been more eager than reluctant to jettison any remnant of semantic presupposition. But at least one major recent approach has attempted to combine an ambiguist line on negation with a non-semantic-or at least non-truth-conditional-analysis of presuppositional phenomena. Lauri Karttunen and Stanley Peters, in a series of individual and joint publications culminating in Karttunen & Peters 1979, have married Grice's notion of conventional implicature to Montague's truth-conditional formal semantics. As in Montague's work, the logic is inten- sional but classically two-valued. Within this framework, a sentence like 1la not only entails 11', but is truth-conditionally identical to it, since the entailment is mutual:

(11) a. John managed to solve the problem. b. John didn't manage to solve the problem. c. It was difficult for John to solve the problem.

(11') John solved the problem. However, 1 la differs from 11' NON-truth-conditionally, in that manage to con- tributes a CONVENTIONAL IMPLICATURE to 1la-and to its ordinary negation, 1 lb-both of which will thereby suggest something like 1 lc. This conventional implicature borne by lla-b is part of the meaning of these sentences, and is thus distinct from what Grice calls CONVERSATIONAL implicatures; some of the essential differences between these two notions are spelled out in Table 4 (cf. Grice 1975, 1978; Sadock 1978; Karttunen & Peters 1979).

CONVENTIONAL IMPLICATURES CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURES

(a) Make no contribution to TRUTH conditions, but constrain APPROPRIATENESS of expressions with which they are associated.

(b) UNPREDICTABLE, arbitrary part of meaning; must be learned ad hoc.

(c) NON-CANCELABLE; apply in all contexts.

(d) DETACHABLE: two synonyms may have different conventional implicatures.

(e) NOT CALCULABLE through any procedure; must be stipulated.

(f) Akin to pragmatic presuppositions (non- controversial propositions speaker takes as part of common ground); cf. Stalnaker 1974.

(g) Exhibit a well-defined set of PROJECTION PROPERTIES enabling implicata of larger expression to be computed from implicata of its subparts.

NATURAL concomitant of what is said or how it is said; NON-CONVENTIONAL by definition.

CANCELABLE either explicitly (by linguistic context) or implicitly (by extralinguistic context).

NON-DETACHABLE if arising via one of the content maxims (Quality, Quantity, Relation).

CALCULABLE through Cooperative Principle and maxims.

Possibly related to Mill's 'sous-entendu of common conversation' (1867:501) or Ducrot's 'sous-entendu' as discourse or rhetorical notion.

Projection properties, if any, are poorly understood; conversational implicatures 'may be indeterminate' (Grice).

TABLE 4.

Crucially, the falsity of 1lc does not affect the truth conditions for lla-b: the former is true if and only if 11' is true, the latter iff 11' is false. Rather,

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11 c represents an appropriateness condition on the normal, felicitous utterance of both la and llb.7

But now the old Russellian ambiguity of negation rears its hoary head: as Karttunen & Peters concede, 1 lb can be uttered in contexts where 1 lc is not only NOT taken for granted, as part of the common ground of discourse, but is in fact the very component of meaning being negated or denied. This reading of 1 Ib, which K&P call CONTRADICTION NEGATION, and link up with the familiar external negative operator of three-valued logics discussed in ?1.1, emerges more clearly with the right intonation contour (cf. Liberman & Sag 1974) and an appropriate continuation:

(12) John didn't MANAGE to solve the problem- it was quite easy for him to solve. he was given the answer.

K&P point out (46-7) that contradiction negation-unlike ordinary, conventional-implicature-preserving negation-is incapable of triggering negative polarity items. Thus the ordinary negation of 13a is 13b, where the existential shows up as any in the scope of negation:

(13) a. John managed to solve some problems. b. John didn't manage to solve any problems. c. John didn't MANAGE to solve {some/*any} problems-

they were quite easy for him to do. he was given the answers.

d. Bill hasn't already forgotten that today is Friday, because today is Thursday. (= K&P's 77b)

But with contradiction negation, as in 13c, no some/any suppletion is possible. Similarly, we find already rather than negative polarity yet in 13d, where contradiction negation removes the conventional implicatum associated with factive forget.

Linebarger also explores the failure of external negation to trigger polarity items; following Kroch 1974, she attributes this failure to the intervention of an abstract TRUE predicate immediately within the scope of negation, so that the first clause of 13c is assigned essentially the following logical form:

(14) NOT TRUE (13a)

We shall see in ?2.5 that this identification of external negation with the abstract predicate TRUE fails to generalize successfully.

K&P (47-8) account for their marked contradiction negation by assigning it wide scope with respect to material which is conventionally implicated, as in 15b. Such implicata are always outside the scope of ORDINARY negation, as

7 Neither the original Gricean notion of conventional implicature, nor its (re)working-out by K&P, is uncontroversial. In particular, the properties referred to in (c) and (g) of Table 4 may be mutually incompatible: cf., inter alia, Wilson 1975, Gazdar 1979a,b, Soames 1979, Horn 1979, 1981. Since the relevant issue is the interaction of conventional implicature with negation, the more global questions can be safely deferred.

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seen in 15a: (15) a. ORDINARY NEGATION OF 4): (1 )e; (i)

b. CONTRADICTION NEGATION OF (): (-] [?eA4)i]; [4iV] ()i]) (Here {e represents the truth-conditional meaning of <(, and b' its conventional implicata; the members of each ordered pair denote respectively the 'extension expression' and the 'implicature expression' for the negative form specified.)

In the case under consideration, the ordinary negation of 1 la amounts to conveying the conjunction 16a, although the first conjunct is implicated and the second entailed; the contradiction negation (e.g. in 12) amounts to the negated conjunction 16b:

(16) a. It was difficult for John to qj & -(John Jd). b. -(It was difficult for John to ' & John pd).

As K&P note (47), the contradiction negation represented in 15b and 16b is 'by itself non-specific (in the absence of contrastive intonation) in regard to what it is that the speaker is objecting to'.

In the language of Karttunen's earlier work, ordinary negation is a HOLE to conventional implicata (a.k.a. presuppositions), and contradiction negation is a PLUG.8 This approach echoes Russell's scopal analysis of the two negations (note that just one selected conjunct is negated in 2' and 16a, but the entire conjunction in 2" and 16b)-as well as a similar device, employing a kind of translucent brackets, that was semi-seriously put forward by Grice 1967 for deriving the two readings of Russell's 2. (Grice 1967 finally rejected this brack- eting approach, in favor of a somewhat vague pragmatic analysis of presupposition and negation; but he has revived it for reconsideration in Grice 1981.)

We have arrived by now at the situation depicted in Table 5. (Note that, for Strawson, negation was unambiguously internal-by default, as it were, since he never acknowledged the existence of sentences like 4 or 12. His position was probably untenable, and will henceforth be disregarded here.)

Do truth- Do semantic Is negation value gaps presuppositions semantically

exist? exist? ambiguous? Strawson: yes yes no Russell: no no yes Lukasiewicz,

Smiley, Herzberger, ? 'ambiguists' Katz: yes yes yes

Karttunen & Peters: no yes (as conven. implics.) yes

Atlas, Boer & Lycan, Kempson, Gazdar: no no no 'monoguists'

TABLE 5.

8 Cf. Karttunen 1974. Note that the 'plug' nature of contradiction negation is represented in 15b by assigning a tautological implicatum. An analysis similar to K&P's is that in Ducrot 1972, to be discussed in ?4.2 below.

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On the one hand, we have the original ambiguist thesis on negation in both its classical (Russellian) and revisionist (three-valued) versions-as well as the K&P compromise position, which some have suggested has all the vices of each without the virtues of the other. On the other hand, we have the monoguist antithesis which Occamistically denies any ambiguities in natural language negation, but offers no ready explanation for the intuition shared by ambiguists of all camps that negative sentences like 2 and 1 lb may be used in two radically different ways, with (as K&P note) distinct linguistic correlates in each case. What we need here is evidently a Hegelian synthesis-one, we must hope, more explanatory than that the king of France wears a wig.

METALINGUISTIC VS. DESCRIPTIVE NEGATION

2. In the synthesis I shall advocate here, negation is indeed ambiguous, contra Atlas, Kempson, Gazdar, et al. But contra Russell, Karttunen & Peters, and the three-valued logicians, it is not SEMANTICALLY ambiguous. Rather, we are dealing with a PRAGMATIC ambiguity, a built-in duality of use. If I am correct, we must reject the classical view-cited by Prior (1967:459) and subscribed to in varying ways by virtually all previous analysts-that 'all forms of negation are reducible to a suitably placed "It is not the case that".'

That we must reckon with a special or marked use of negation,9 irreducible to the ordinary internal truth-functional operator, is best seen not in examples like Russell's 2'/2" or K&P's 1 lb/12, but in environments like 17, where what is negated is a CONVERSATIONAL implicatum:

(17) a. SOME men aren't chauvinists-ALL men are chauvinists. b. John didn't manage to solve SOME of the problems-he managed

to solve ALL of them. Such examples cannot be collapsed with 12 under K&P's approach without incorporating conversational implicata (like the conventional implicata of 15b and 16b) into the logical form for these sentences; yet conversational implicata by definition are not part of logical form (cf. Grice 1975, 1978, Karttunen & Peters 1979).

The cases below are even more devastating to any generalized semantic account of marked negation, which would presumably be driven to importing phonetic representation and inflectional morphology into logical form, within the scope of the negation:

(18) a. (So, you [miYonijd] to solve the problem.) No, I didn't [mYonij'] to solve the problem-I [maenijd] to solve

the problem. b. I didn't manage to trap two monGEEsE-I managed to trap two

mOnGOOSES.

A related use of negation is found in the French example below, where the grammatical gender assignment and the woeful English accent are somehow

9 For expository purposes, the label 'marked (use of) negation' will continue to be employed as a pre-theoretical descriptor for natural language negative morphemes which do not correspond to truth-functional internal negation (i.e. to what I shall later term 'descriptive negation').

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brought within the scope of negation: (19) (Esker too ah coo-pay luh vee-and?)

Non, je n'ai pas 'coo-pay luh vee-and'-j'ai coupe la viande.

Analogously, we see in 20 that one speaker may employ negation to reject the pragmatics associated with the register or stylistic level chosen by another speaker in the discourse context (because of insufficient or oversufficient del- icacy):

(20) a. Now, Cindy, dear, Grandma would like you to speak a bit more like a lady: Phydeaux didn't 'shit the rug', he {defecated / pooped / had a BM} on the carpet.

b. Grandma isn't 'feeling lousy', Johnny, she's indisposed. c. We didn't {'have intercourse' / 'make love'}-we fucked.

In 21, one description is jettisoned in favor of another whose contributions to truth-conditional meaning are virtually identical to it in the relevant context, but which differs from it in focus or connotation:

(21) a. Ben Ward is not a black Police Commissioner but a Police Com- missioner who is black. (N.Y. Times editorial, 11/8/83)

b. I'm not his daughter-he's my father. (cf. Wilson, 152) c. She isn't Lizzy, if you please-she's Her Imperial Majesty. d. For a pessimist like him, the glass isn't half full-it's half empty. e. I'm not a TrotskylTE-I'm a TrotskyisT.

Such uses of negation may be marked, but they are by no means marginal or inconsequential in communication.'( Indeed, an instance like 21d has

'o Closely related to the examples in 21 is the use of negation to focus on and register objection to a previous speaker's racist or sexist vocabulary. Consider the truth conditions of sentences like this:

(a) {Niggers/Broads} will benefit from improvements in medicine. Such sentences have received a good deal of recent attention (cf. Grim 1981, Stenner 1981, Taylor 1981) as philosophers have debated whether an objection to the world view which attaches to the use of loaded words like nigger and broad is sufficient to render the statements made via these offensive descriptions automatically false or devoid of truth value. For Grim, if (a) is bivalent (whether it is true or false), it commits us to a disjunction:

(b) It is either true that {niggers/broads} will benefit from improvements in medicine or false that {niggers/broads} will benefit from improvements in medicine.

Yet a commitment to (b) seems to entail a commitment to {racism/sexism}. However we may deal with Grim's problem (cf. fn. 14 below), it is relevant that metalinguistic negation can be employed by a speaker who wishes to reject the bigoted or chauvinistic point of view embodied in an earlier statement within the discourse context:

(c) I beg your pardon: Lee isn't an 'uppity {nigger/broad/kike/wop/...}'-(s)he's a strong, vibrant {black/woman/Jew/Italian/...}.

For someone who utters (c), as with 20-21, the denotative meaning of the statement under attack (what was SAID) may well have corresponded exactly to that of the rectified statement; the connotative meaning (what was IMPLICATED) cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged. R. Lakoff (1975:19-27) points out that we seem to need euphemisms in exactly those referential contexts where we also have slurs. It is thus significant that we find both euphemisms and their metalinguistic rejections in the Grim contexts above:

(d) I'm not 'colored'-I'm black! (e) I'm not 'a gentleman of the Israelite persuasion'-I'm a Jew! (f) I'm not a 'lady'-I'm a woman!

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achieved the status of a cliche-second only perhaps to that in 22, where the play between ordinary and marked uses of negation has entered immortality through vaudeville:

(22) (Who was that lady I saw you with last night?) That was no lady, that was my wife!

Note that the second speaker in this routine does not intend to suggest that his wife is not a lady; rather, the negation attaches to the implicature associated with the first speaker's utterance. The implicatural mechanism here is akin to that in an example of Grice:

(22') X is meeting a woman this evening. Use of this 'would normally implicate that the person to be met was someone other than X's wife, mother, sister, or perhaps even close platonic friend' (Grice 1975:56). While not all speakers may find this implicature as 'non-controversial' as Grice maintains, it appears to me that-to the extent it is felt to be present in 22'-it can be removed through negation:

(22") No, he's not (meeting a woman this evening)-he's meeting his wife. While the relevant implicata being denied or forestalled in 22 and 22" result

from the exploitation of the content maxim of Quantity ('Make your contribution as informative as is required'-Grice 1975:45), manner-generated implicata may also be rejected; e.g.,

(23) Miss X didn't 'produce a series of sounds that corresponded closely with the score of "Home Sweet Home" ,' dammit, she SANG 'Home Sweet Home'.

Here what is denied is the reviewer's implicatum, devolving from an exploitation of the Brevity maxim, viz. that 'Miss X's performance suffered from some hideous defect' (cf. Grice 1975:55-6).

But we have clearly come a long way from either the well-behaved ordinary internal negation operator or the semantic external negation operator of three- valued logics of the K&P analysis. What we are dealing with in the negative examples of 17-23 are reflexes of what Ducrot 1972 has aptly termed META- LINGUISTIC negation-a means for objecting to a previous utterance on any grounds whatever, including (as in 18-19) the way it was pronounced."

It remains to be shown that these examples involve the SAME basic use of negation as that found in K&P's examples of canceled or rejected conventional implicata, as in 12. To this end, note first that, in the negative sentences of 17-23 (as in 12), felicitous use involves contrastive intonation with a final rise within the negated clause (the 'contradiction contour' of Liberman & Sag), followed by a continuation in which the offending item is replaced by the correct item in the appropriate lexical, morphological, and phonetic garb-a RECTI-

FICATION, to borrow a term from Anscombre & Ducrot. But it is not only the intonation and rectification which point to a kinship with 'external' or 'con-

" Ducrot 1973, in place of his 'negation m6talinguistique' of 1972, uses the new label 'negation polemique'. I consider the earlier term more felicitous, especially in the light of examples not discussed by Ducrot and his colleagues, e.g. 18-19. Negation does constitute in these cases a way of rejecting the language used by an earlier speaker, and is therefore indeed METALINGUISTIC; but it seems stretching the notion of polemics or argumentation to label this variety of negation POLEMIC.

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tradiction' negation: in the cases just discussed, like those of K&P, no negative polarity items are triggered. Thus, while 17b is possible with metalinguistic negation, its polarity counterpart is not:

(24) *John didn't manage to solve ANY of the problems-he managed to solve ALL of them.

And parallel to 13c, in which some/any suppletion is ruled out, we also find this:

(25) I didn't [miYonij] to solve {some/*any} of the problems-I [maenijd] to solve some of the problems.

Of course, the principal resemblance between the instances of marked negation introduced in this section and the classical examples of presupposition- canceling negation discussed earlier is that both types occur naturally only as responses to utterances by other speakers earlier in the same discourse contexts (or as mid-course corrections, after earlier utterances by the same speakers). It is for this reason that I seek to encompass all these examples under the rubric of metalinguistic negation: they all involve the same extended use of negation as a way for speakers to announce their unwillingness to assert something in a given way, or to accept another's assertion of it in that way. Given the behavioral resemblances just cited, as well as the prevailing Occamist considerations, there is no obvious reason NOT to collapse the presupposition-canceling negation of 4 and 12 with the negation attaching to conversational implicature in 17, 22, 22", and 23, to pronunciation in 18a and 19, to morphology or syntax in 18b and 19, to register or speech level in 20, and to perspective or point of view in 21.

2.1. PRAGMATIC AMBIGUITY. The notion to which I am appealing here has a rich, if brief, history. Donnellan 1966 coined the term to describe the two understandings he found for a sentence like the following:

(26) Smith's murderer is insane. a. ATTRIBUTIVE: Whoever it may have been who murdered Smith is

insane. b. REFERENTIAL: That individual [to whom I refer via the phrase

Smith's murderer] is insane. In 26a, the description Smith's murderer is used essentially; but in 26b, it is employed as a tool for picking out a specific individual and predicating something of him (or her), regardless of whether that individual did in fact murder Smith.

Similarly, Wertheimer argues persuasively that sentences containing modals, e.g. 27, are not semantically ambiguous, but have either of two uses, as paraphrased in 27a-b, depending on the system of rules which is being implicitly invoked:

(27) Lee {should / ought to} be in Chicago today. a. EPISTEMIC: According to my calculations, Lee is (probably) in Chi-

cago today. b. ROOT or DEONTIC: It would be {desirable / a good idea} for Lee to

be in Chicago today.

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(Kratzer 1977 arrives independently at an analysis which also treats modals as pragmatically ambiguous; Palmer 1979, Leech & Coates 1980 offer complex mixed treatments, incorporating both polysemy and semantic indeterminacy in their analyses of modal 'ambiguities'.)

A third example of pragmatic ambiguity has already been touched upon. As suggested by Grice 1967, 1975-and elaborated by Horn 1972, 1973, Gazdar 1979a,b-scalar predications like those below can be considered pragmatically ambiguous as between the implicature-bearing version (the 'two-sided' understanding of Aristotle, with lower and upper bounds, which results in conveying 28a and 29a respectively) and the implicature-free 'one-sided' version (with lower bound only, as in 28b and 29b):

(28) Some men are chauvinists. a. Some but (for all I know) not all men are chauvinists.

( Some if not all . . b. S e if n ll men are chauvinists. LAt least some J

(29) It is possible that it will rain tomorrow. a. It is possible but (for all I know) not {necessary/certain} that it

will rain tomorrow. b. It is at least possible that it will rain tomorrow.

In these examples, as in those of 26-27, the context (either linguistic or extralinguistic) may explicitly or implicitly select one of the two possible understandings as preferred.

None of these proposed analyses is uncontroversial. Thus Donnellan 1978 argues for a SEMANTIC treatment of the ambiguity in 26 (but cf. Kaplan 1978, Kripke 1977 for defenses of Donnellan 1966); the standard linguistic line on modals treats them as SEMANTICALLY (and possibly syntactically) ambiguous between epistemic and root (deontic) readings (cf. Hofmann 1966, Newmeyer 1969, Horn 1972, Jackendoff 1972); and there are at least two recent accounts of weak scalar predications of the type illustrated in 28-29 which treat them as SEMANTICALLY-or at any rate, truth-conditionally-ambiguous (Cormack 1980, Burton-Roberts 1984; also cf. Kempson 1982).

Nevertheless, I believe the pragmatic version of these ambiguities is largely correct (cf. Horn 1984), and that the line taken on such constructions is naturally extendible to negation. What I am claiming for negation, then, is a use distinction: it can be a descriptive truth-functional operator, taking a proposition p into a proposition not-p, or a metalinguistic operator which can be glossed 'I object to u', where u is crucially a linguistic utterance rather than an abstract proposition. 12

In claiming that negation is pragmatically, rather than semantically, ambig-

12 As Barbara Abbott has pointed out to me, u need not even be a specifically linguistic utterance, as seen by the function of metalinguistic negation in the following musical scenario:

Piano student plays passage in manner L. Teacher: 'It's not [plays passage in manner JL]-It's [plays same passage in manner '].'

The teacher's use of not is clearly not assimilable to anything remotely resembling truth-functional propositional negation.

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uous, I am partly in accord with the classic monoguist position summarized by Gazdar (1979a:92): 'There are no grounds for thinking that natural language negation is semantically distinct from the bivalent operator found in the propositional calculus.' But the spirit (if not the letter) of this position is violated by my approach, which takes a wide array of uses of natural language negation to be NON-truth-functional, and indeed entirely non-semantic. (Note that the pragmatic ambiguity of negation, as conceived here, is not entirely on a par with the instances of pragmatic ambiguity just cited, where NEITHER understanding directly affects logical form.)

2.2. TRUTH VS. ASSERTABILITY. If we temporarily set aside the more extreme cases of metalinguistic negation (e.g. those affecting phonetic representation, as in 18a), then the distinction drawn above recalls a distinction made elsewhere, the import of which has been insufficiently appreciated: that of the truth of a proposition vs. the assertability of a statement or sentence. As Grice 1967 has forcefully pointed out, either truth or assertibility can be affected by negation; it is up to the addressee to determine just what the speaker intended to object to or deny in the use of a negative form at a given point in the conversation.

Grice defends the position that ordinary-language or exhibits the truth-conditional semantics associated with the familiar truth table for inclusive disjunction, represented in the third column in Table 6. He deals with a potential

p q p V q p Vq p -q (p--q)

T T T F T F T F T T F T F T T T T F F F F F T F

TABLE 6.

objection to this claim as follows (V:9): 'If you say "X or Y will be elected", I may reply "That's not so: X or Y OR Z will be elected." Here ... I am rejecting "X or Y will be elected" not as false but as unassertable.'

Grice puts this distinction to work in defense of his truth-conditional analysis of conditionals. He begins by conceding that 30 does not have the truth conditions which we should expect of a negated material conditional (cf. the last two columns of Table 6):

(30) It is not the case that, if X is given penicillin, he will get better. After all, this does not normally commit the speaker to an assertion of the conjunction 'X will be given penicillin and won't get better', i.e. the second line of Table 6. In the same way, I can deny Nietzsche's notorious conditional 31a without committing myself to the conjunction in 31b:

(31) a. If God is dead, everything is permitted. b. God is dead and something is forbidden.

Grice points out, however, that a speaker uttering 30-or, even more clearly, 30'-is not, in fact, truly NEGATING the contained conditional proposition, but

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is rather ASSERTING HIS UNWILLINGNESS TO ASSERT that proposition (V:5). (30') It is not the case that, if X is given penicillin, he will get better; it

might very well have no effect on him at all. Here as elsewhere, 32a is to be interpreted as a refusal to assert If p then q: rather than as a (descriptive) negation of a conditional whose truth value is determined in accordance with the material equivalence in 32b:'3

(32) a. It is not the case that if-p-then-q. b. -(p -- q)

-

(p & ~q) I do not want to insist here on a wholesale defense of Grice's analysis. His

advocacy of material implication as an adequate representation for the semantics of natural language conditionals is especially moot; indeed, the truth conditions for if-then statements have been passionately but inconclusively argued ever since the 3rd century B.C., when Callimachus observed that 'even the crows on the rooftop are cawing about which conditionals are true' (Mates 1949:234). But the distinction drawn by Grice (and Dummett, cf. fn. 13, above)-between rejecting a claim as false, and rejecting it as (perhaps true but) unassertable-suggests the proper approach for characterizing the two general uses of negation.14

13 The same point is made by Dummett (1973:328-30), who draws a distinction between negation outside the scope of a Fregean assertion operator, 'Not (-A)', as opposed to the normal assertion of a negative proposition, '-(not A)'. The former interpretation, he suggests, 'might be taken to be a means of expressing an unwillingness to assert "A"'; the clearest candidates for this species of negation are those where 'A' is a conditional. He cites exchanges like this:

(a) X: If it rains, the match will be canceled. Y: That's not so. (OR, I don't think that's the case.)

Here Y's contribution is not actually a negation of X's content; rather, we can paraphrase Y as having conveyed (b) or (c):

(b) If it rains, the match won't necessarily be canceled. (c) It may [epistemic] happen that it rains and yet the match is not canceled.

Dummett, in fact, goes beyond Grice, concluding (330) that apparently 'we have no negation of the conditional of natural language, that is, no negation of its sense: we have only a form for expressing refusal to assent to its assertion.' (While Dummett offers no explanation for this curious state of affairs, Grice 1967:V does give a pragmatic story for the failure of conditionals to undergo ordinary descriptive negation.) It should be acknowledged in passing that the notion ASSERTABLE- as employed by Grice, by Dummett, and by me-should properly be taken as elliptical for something like 'felicitously' or 'appropriately' assertable, where the adverbial hedge is broad enough to cover the wide range of examples under consideration here. I take 'assertability' to be an instance of linguistic shorthand on a par with 'Ca'n you say X?' or 'You can't say Y' for judgments of syntactic (un)acceptability.

14 The truth vs. assertability distinction appears to vitiate Grim's argument for the non-bivalence of (a) in fn. 10, above: while (a) does indeed commit us to the TRUTH of (b), it does not commit us to its ASSERTABILITY. Grim is in fact aware of this argument (293-5), but he dismisses it on the grounds that the existence of true 'unassertables' is 'something of an intellectual embarrassment'; an alternative theory which does not posit them is to be preferred. Yet any such alternative must countenance truth-value gaps-a major departure from classical two-valued semantics which may be neither a necessary nor a sufficient expense for dealing with presuppositional phenomena, and is in any case hardly a cause for intellectual pride. If true but unassertable statements must be countenanced in any case (as the discussion in the text and below suggest), it is a simple matter

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2.3. THE SCALAR CASES. We have noted that languages tend not to distinguish internal from external negation morphologically. It is thus especially significant that natural languages seem (almost) always to allow a descriptive negation operator to double for metalinguistic use as a comment on the utterance, chal- lenging what is presupposed or implicated as well as what is asserted. One frequent use of metalinguistic negation-indeed, virtually universal (but cf. ?5 below)-is as a way of disconnecting the implicated upper bound of weak scalar predicates, as in 17 above, or the following:

(33) Around here we don't LIKE coffee-we LOVE it. (Lauren Bacall, in TV commercial for High Point decaf)

Again, let us focus on the contrast between 34a-b, or more precisely on their mutual consistency:

(34) a. Max has three children-indeed, he has four. b. Max doesn't have three children-(*but) he has four. c. Max doesn't have three children, (but) he has two.

It seems peculiar at first glance that the same state of affairs can be alternatively described in terms of Max's HAVING three children and of his NOT having three children.

Following Mill 1867, DeMorgan 1847, and Grice, I have argued elsewhere (Horn 1972, 1973; cf. Gazdar 1979a,b for formalizations) that scalar operators like some (in 28), possible (in 29), like (in 33), and three (in 34) are lower- bounded by their truth-conditional semantics; and that they may be upper- bounded (context permitting) by conversational implicature, triggered by Grice's maxim of Quantity. Given that all men are mortal (or chauvinists-cf. 17a), it's inappropriate, although true, to assert that SOME men are. Similarly, if I know that Max has four children, and this fact is relevant to you, it's misleading for me to inform you that he has three (although it's true that he does). In each case, I have said something true but implicated something false. Within this account, the negation in 34b does not negate the PROPOSITION that Max has three children; rather, it operates on a metalinguistic level to reject the IMPLICATUM that may be associated with the assertion of that proposition (viz. that he has only three). By uttering 34b, the speaker signifies unwillingness

to extend this treatment to cover Grim's cases. (Stenner, in his reply to Grim, advocates essentially this approach.)

I have suggested elsewhere (Horn 1981, fn. 8) that the problems encountered by Aristotle and Lukasiewicz in their analyses of future contingent statements hang on the failure to appreciate this distinction. Pace Aristotle and Lukasiewicz, (exactly) one of the following two statements is indeed TRUE today:

(a) There will be a sea battle tomorrow. (b) There will not be a sea battle tomorrow.

But it may well be that (barring precognition) neither of them may be ASSERTABLE. Thus, the very birth-throes of three-valued logic (in Lukasiewicz 1930) may have been attended by an insufficient recognition of the truth/assertability distinction: an epistemic problem was misdiagnosed as a metaphysical one, and an improper treatment consequently prescribed. (Geach 1972:81 argues that this mistaken line on future contingents was not in fact taken by Aristotle, despite the standard interpretation; in any case, if the Aristotelian man was straw, Lukasiewicz fleshed him out.)

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to assert a sentence which would induce a misleading implicature. The negation in 34c, by contrast, is naturally taken descriptively as attaching to the proposition that Max has three children. (The distribution of but in 34b-c is discussed in the Appendix.)

2.4. INtC(RPORAATEl) NEGAI (ION AS A DIAGNOSTIC. One important correlate of the negative dichotomy resides in the inability of metalinguistic negation to incorporate prefixally:

(35) a. The king of France is {not happy/*unhappy}-there isn't any king of France.

The queen of England is {not happy/*unhappy}-she's ecstatic. It isn't possible

b. It's not possible for you to leave now-it's necessary. *lt's impossible

f not probable . ainnot probable l ,posbe otimprobable t improbable s

f not likely} e . t fnot likely} not likely but certain (vs. not likely if not impossible) *unlikely unlikely

{ not interesting but f *uninteresting J

In each case where the negative operator is used metalinguistically to deny the appropriateness of using a predicate which would yield a true but misleadingly weak assertion (cf. the preceding section), the negation cannot incorporate morphologically as un- or iN--perhaps because it is operating, in effect, on another level. (The failure of metalinguistic negation to trigger polarity items, as discussed above, should probably be pegged to the same factor.) The acceptable incorporated negatives in 35 all involve ordinary, truth-functional uses of the operator.15

Failure to recognize this diagnostic for metalinguistic negation mars an otherwise cogent defense by Gazdar 1977, 1979a of a monoguist analysis of natural language disjunctions. On the view that or is semantically ambiguous, a sentence like 36a will be assigned two distinct logical forms, corresponding to the inclusive (p V q) and exclusive (p V q) interpretations of the connective (cf.

'5 This account of the incorporation diagnostic must draw a sharp distinction between the lexicalized prefixal negation of the examples in 35 and the 'contracted' n't in examples like 34b, 35b, and numerous additional sentences scattered throughout the text. As these examples show, nothing constrains metalinguistic negation from contracting as an enclitic onto the copula. If (as has been traditionally assumed) the n't forms are produced by post-lexical syntactic and/or phonological rules rather than in the lexicon, the distinction is made automatically. However, as Jerry Sadock has pointed out to me, the adoption of Zwicky & Pullum's 1983 analysis of Xn't as an inflected form of the auxiliary element X, generated by the morphology, would require a different account here. I shall simply assume that the grammar has some way of distinguishing the lexical prefixes un-, in-, and non- (which are incompatible with metalinguistic negation) from the -n't forms (which are not).

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Table 6 above): (36) a. John is either patriotic or quixotic.

b. John isn't either patriotic or quixotic. c. John is neither patriotic nor quixotic.

This ambiguist thesis is rejected by Gazdar (1979a:81-2) on the grounds that it makes a 'bizarrely false prediction' when the disjunction is brought within the scope of negation. Thus 36b-and 36c, which Gazdar takes to be its paraphrase-will be assigned two readings by the ambiguist analysis, with negation outside the scope of inclusive and exclusive disjunction, respectively. Given the standard equivalence

(36') ~(p V q) (-p & -q) V (p & q), the exclusive reading of 36b-c will be true if John is both patriotic and quixotic. Gazdar concludes that the ambiguist thesis on disjunction is prima facie absurd, since 36b-c are patently false in this state of affairs.

Yet Gazdar's argument contains a fatal flaw: 36b does allow a reading which is NOT patently false, i.e. the reading which involves the metalinguistic use of negation. Consider the following:

(37) a. Maggie isn't EITHER patriotic OR quixotic-she's both! b. *Maggie is neither patriotic nor quixotic-she's both!

Not only is 37a a possible discourse utterance, it's also one with which most British subjects would happily agree (for the most prominent referent of the proper name). However, this reading disappears, as it should, when the negation is incorporated in 37b. Since such incorporated negation can only be descriptive, 37b is indeed a logical contradiction, as Gazdar's analysis predicts.

A recently attested instance of just such a metalinguistic use of negation as that contained in 37a is the following:

(38) The Constitution doesn't say provide for the common defense OR the general welfare; it says both. (Walter Mondale, at the Democratic National Party Conference in Philadelphia, 1982, quoted in the N.Y. Times)

As further confirmation of the claim that the negation in 37a or 38 is metalinguistic in the strong sense intended here (as a comment on an earlier utterance rather than a propositional negation), consider the apparent (graphemic) contradiction in 39a, which can nevertheless be resolved in the appropriate context, illustrated in 39b:

(39) a. Maggie isn't either patriotic or quixotic-she's either patriotic or quixotic.

b. -Say, {Clive/Fiona}, you have to admit your Maggie is [fYSr peYtriaDik or kwlksaDik].

-No, I haven't. Maggie isn't [iY.r peYtriaDik or kwtksaDik]- she's [aySo petriotik o' kwiksotik].

Curiously, Gazdar's argument-flaw and all-was prefigured in a parallel attack by Grice (1978:116-18) on a different ambiguist treatment of disjunction.

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In Grice's case, the relevant 'strengthening' property is not the truth-functional one of exclusivity, but a non-truth-functional, epistemically based condition on the appropriate use of disjunctive statements which Strawson and others have attributed to the meaning of ordinary-language or. On that view (cf. Grice 1967:I), speakers who utter 'p or q' license the inference that they do not know for a fact that p is the case (or, of course, that q is). Thus I cannot felicitously utter 40, on the 'strong' reading of or, if I know for a fact that my wife is in Oxford (and if this fact is relevant to you when I utter 40):

(40) My wife is either in Oxford or in London. Grice (1978:116-8) notes that the 'strong' reading for this disjunction (the reading which builds in the strengthening property) seems to disappear under negation, as in 41a; but he does NOT mention that the relevant non-truth-functional aspect of the interpretation of such disjunctions may indeed be canceled by metalinguistic use of negation, as in 41b-d:

(41) a. Your wife isn't (either) in Oxford or in London. b. Your wife isn't (EITHER) in Oxford OR in London, dammit, she's

in Oxford, as you bloody well know! c. I didn't do it once or twice-I did it once and once only! d. It won't be Noam's Pride OR Resnic's Choice standing laurel-

crowned in the winner's circle-it'll be Noam's Pride, you can bet on it!

In these examples, a disjunction is again disowned-not because it is false, but because the utterance expressing it would be too weak and hence regarded as unassertable. In 37a, 38, and 41b-d (as in 17, 33, and 34b in the earlier discussion) negation is used metalinguistically to focus on the implicatum triggered by the maxim of Quantity. In such cases, the negation often seems to build in a covert just or only which can in fact be expressed directly without changing the import.16 Compare the versions of 42 with and without the pa-

16 Analogous cases based on clefts are adduced in Horn 1981 for an argument that the 'exhaustiveness' premise is not part of the meaning of cleft sentences, i.e. that (a) does not (pace Atlas & Levinson 1981) ENTAIL or (pace Halvorsen 1978) CONVENTIONALLY IMPLICATE (b):

(a) It was a pizza that Mary ate. (b) Mary ate nothing other than a pizza.

It may seem that (c) below, from Atlas & Levinson, or the analogous (d), suggests that the failure of exhaustiveness to hold DOES constitute sufficient grounds for denying the truth of a cleft:

(c) It wasn't John that Mary kissed, it was John and Bill. (d) It wasn't a pizza that Mary ate-it was a pizza, a calzone, and a side order of ziti.

In fact, if such sentences are acceptable (as Atlas & Levinson maintain), they are acceptable only with metalinguistic negation, canceling the upper-bounding (exhaustiveness) implicatum. Note first that just may be inserted, salva veritate (et sensu), immediately after the negation in (c) and (d) as easily as in the cases of 42. Furthermore, the same construction occurs without cleft syntax:

(e) Mary didn't eat (just) A PIZZA-she ate a pizza, a calzone, AND a side order of ziti. If Mary ate a pizza along with other items, it is undeniably TRUE that she ate a pizza; negation here, as in (c) and (d), is used to deny not truth but assertability. (Thatjust or only can be inserted in these cases should not be taken as evidence that metalinguistic not can be analysed essentially as elliptical for not only: cf. ?4.1 below. For additional discussion of the relation between clefts and exhaustiveness, cf. Horn 1981.)

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renthesized element following metalinguistic negation: (42) a. Max doesn't have (just) THREE children-he has FOUR.

b. You didn't eat (just) SOME of the cookies-you ate ALL of them. c. Around here, we don't (just) LIKE coffee-we LOVE it. d. I don't (just) BELIEVE it-I KNOW it.

Another morpho-syntactic correlate of the metalinguistic/descriptive dichotomy exhibited by natural language negation can be found in the distribution of concessive and contrastive but constructions, discussed in the Appendix.

2.5. TRUTH, TRUE, AND NEGATION. As noted in ?1.3, the Kroch-Linebarger line on negative statements treats external negation as an ordinary truth-functional negative operator applied to a semantic TRUE predicated directly within its scope. Consider sentences like these:

(43) a. *She DID NOT lift a finger to help. b. *We DID NOT get up until 12:00.

Seeking to explain the unacceptability of negative polarity items when they are read as 'denials', with rising intonation, Linebarger (35) cites Kroch's definition of 'external negation' as

'a "metalinguistic" usage in which the negative sentence NOT S does not directly comment on the state of affairs but instead denies the truth of the statement S previously uttered or implied. Sentence-external negation can be paraphrased as "The sentence S is not true".'

Linebarger formalizes this account of external negation by representing the logical form of the 'denial' readings of 43a-b as follows:

(43') a. NOT TRUE (she lifted a finger to help). b. NOT TRUE (we got up until 12:00).

What rules these out as possible well-formed formulas is that the negative polarity items (lift a finger and until) are no longer within the immediate scope of negation; thus they fail to meet what for Linebarger is a necessary (although not sufficient) condition for the acceptability of the relevant type of polarity trigger. In the same fashion, Linebarger (36 ff.) notes, the ill-formedness of 44 is correctly predicted by assigning it the 'external' representation 44':

(44) *The King of France didn't contribute one red cent because there is no King of France.

(44') NOT TRUE (the King of France contributed one red cent) ... One possible objection to this characterization of 'external' negation is that- as investigators as diverse as Frege (cf. Dummett 1973), Wittgenstein 1953, ?447, Ducrot 1973:119, and Givon 1978 have observed-ALL instances of negation (including the ordinary, garden-variety propositional negation which logicians try to capture) may be viewed as constituting, in Kroch's words, a way to deny 'the truth of the statement S previously uttered or implied'.

That is, negative statements, regardless of the specific function of negation in question, are marked with respect to the corresponding affirmative; and they often pragmatically presuppose a context in which the affirmative proposition has been asserted or at least entertained. Thus Givon (109) concludes, from his extensive cross-linguistic survey, that negative statements tend to be uttered

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'in a context where the corresponding affirmatives have already been discussed, or else where the speaker assumes the hearer's belief in-and thus familiarity with-the corresponding affirmative'; he shows that the reflexes of these 'discourse-pragmatic presuppositions' associated with negation include the restricted distribution, diachronic conservatism, and psychological com- plexity of negatives vis-a-vis affirmatives.

Whether or not this characterization of negation is correct (cf. ?4.1), a more serious problem remains for the Kroch-Linebarger position. We have encountered many cases which pose insurmountable difficulties for any theory in which the special metalinguistic negation exemplified in 43-44 is directly associated with denial of truth: exx. 17-23, 30', 34b, 37a, 42 etc. It hardly seems plausible to analyse 17a (SOME men aren't chauvinists-ALL men are chauvinists) in terms of a Linebargerian representation like the following:

(45) NOT TRUE (some men are chauvinists) ... Even in the more semantically-based examples considered by Karttunen &

Peters 1979, such as 12 (John didn't MANAGE to solve the problem-it was quite easy for him to solve), we encounter the same sort of problem. An analysis of this 'external' or 'contradiction' negation along the line of the Linebarger model yields this:

(46) NOT TRUE (John managed to solve the problem) ...

Yet, as K&P correctly observe, the simplest truth-conditional account of sentences like 12 is one in which the proposition corresponding to the parenthe- sized material in 46 is indeed true in any state of affairs in which John solved the problem.

The difference between the manage case of 12 and the classic king of France example in 44 is that propositions containing definite descriptions ENTAIL (as well as presuppose or conventionally implicate) the corresponding existential expressions; but X managed to c does NOT entail (though it may presuppose or conventionally implicate) that it was difficult for X to k (cf. Karttunen & Peters 1979, Gazdar 1979a).

Metalinguistic negation, as we have seen, is used to deny or object to any aspect of a previous utterance-from the conventional or conversational implicata that may be associated with it, to its syntactic, morphological, or phonetic form. There can be no justification for inserting an operator TRUE into the logical form for a certain subclass of marked negative sentences, in order for 'external' negation to be able to focus on it, if metalinguistic negation does not in general directly affect truth conditions.

Perhaps in these cases of non-truth-functional negation, we could try placing the negative operator outside the scope of a semantic operator like APPROPRIATE or CORRECT, rather than TRUE. But this 'solution' merely shifts the problem back one level, given that metalinguistic negation-unlike ordinary descriptive negation, or the so-called 'external' semantic negation of Kroch and Linebarger (which I am arguing does not exist)-is simply not a truth-functional operator on propositions. Thus representations like 47a are essentially as inadequate as

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47b for the cases under consideration, given that those aspects of the utterance which metalinguistic negation is used to focus on may have nothing to do with the proposition expressed by the utterance:

(47) a. NOT {APPROPRIATE/CORRECT} (p) b. NOT TRUE (p)

Conventional implicata (or presuppositions) may be analysed as attributes of propositions (albeit non-truth-conditional attributes); but conversational implicata-and, a-fortiori, morphological and phonetic form, register etc.-cannot be.

This essential difference between descriptive and metalinguistic negation provides the most serious problem for the over-Occamistic view of the strong monoguists, that all uses of negation can be assimilated to the same truth- functional analysis. It must not be overlooked that marked negation differs from descriptive negation not only phonologically, morphologically, and syntactically, but also in semantic function. In particular, metalinguistic negation, as an extra-logical operator, plays no straightforward role with respect to such central inference rules as double negation and modus tollendo ponens (M.T.P.); these laws would thus be unstatable if all uses of negation were to be treated identically. If we chose to tar descriptive negation with the same brush as metalinguistic negation, we could no longer draw such basic inferences as these:

(48) a. I didn't manage to solve the problem. .. I didn't solve the problem. (cf. 18a)

b. Maggie isn't either patriotic or quixotic. .'. Maggie isn't patriotic. (cf. 37a)

In the same vein, Wilson (149), citing disjunctive denials of the type first noted by Grice (cf. ?2.2 above), observes that the two clauses of 49 seem to constitute premises in a disjunctive syllogism, viz. 49':

(49) The next Prime Minister won't be Heath: it will be Heath or Wilson. (49') -p

pVq .'. q (via M.T.P.)

Yet we don't actually infer q-i.e., The next P.M. will be Wilson-from an assertion of 49. But instances of DESCRIPTIVE negation DO license M.T.P.: if I know that Heath or Wilson has been elected, and I hear Heath's concession speech, I do have the right to conclude that Wilson (Harold, not Deirdre) was the winner. In short, forcing all instances of negation into a single Procrustean bed-however skillfully the bed may be designed-accomplishes little beyond playing Pandar to some rather odd bedfellows.

But if metalinguistic uses of negation involve denial of assertability, rather than of truth, why is it that the syntax used to express this use of negation often seems to bring in some explicit reference to what is true? Recall that, in 34b (Max doesn't have THREE children-he has FOUR), I claimed that negation attaches metalinguistically to the conversational implicatum associated with the utterance of Max has three children, rather than descriptively to the prop-

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osition expressed by that utterance. But at least some speakers can also get 50a, and sentences like 50b are also heard and interpreted without difficulty:

(50) a. It's not true that Max has THREE children-he has FOUR. b. It's not {true / the case} that SOME men are chauvinists-ALL men

are chauvinists. (cf. 17a) Parallel syntax can also be found in Grice's disjunctive and conditional examples, discussed in ?2.2 above.

Does this mean that we're on the wrong track? Do these examples involve a semantic external negation after all-so that (Occam's razor notwithstanding) conditionals, disjunctions, and weak scalar predications are all semantically ambiguous? No. Rather, what these sentences show is that the distribution of the English expressions It is true that, It is the case that, It is so that etc.- and their correspondents cross-linguistically-is a poor guide at best as to where the LOGICAL predicate TRUE is to be applied in the simplest, most elegant semantic/pragmatic theory of natural language meaning and communication.

We often say that something isn't true, meaning that it isn't assertable. This is not ALWAYS possible: thus it strikes me as odd to insert true into those metalinguistic examples hinging on grammar, speech level, or phonetics:

(51) a. ?*It's not true that I [miYonijd] to solve the problem-I [menijd] to solve the problem.

b. ?*It's not the case that the dog SHAT on the carpet-he DEFECATED on it.

c. ?*Ce n'est pas vrai que j'ai 'coo-pay luh vee-and'-j'ai coupe la viande.

It is true that the implicature-canceling examples of 50a-b remain problemat- ical. But it is no less true that, in ordinary language, we often deny or ascribe truth to a given proposition in many instances where the simplest theory would represent us as in actuality doing something else entirely. One case in point is inspired by an example from Wilson (151):

(52) It's not true that they had a baby and got married-they got married and had a baby.

Here the self-proclaimed 'truth negation' focuses on an aspect of the use of conjunction which Grice 1967, 1975 has convincingly argued is not part of truth or meaning proper at all: the interpretation of and in certain contexts as and then.17

17 Evidence for the view that conjunctions like

(a) They had a baby and got married

are not semantically ambiguous between 'and also' and 'and then' readings includes the following facts:

(i) On the ambiguist theory, conjunction in virtually every language would be ambiguous in just the same way.

(ii) No natural language contains a single conjunction which is ambiguous between 'and also' vs. 'and earlier' readings; i.e., no language could be just like English except that it would contain a conjunction SHMAND such that

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For an even more clearcut example, I shall turn to some personally attested evidence involving the extended use of true in a non-negative context. Several years ago, I was awakened for a pragmatics class by the sound of my electric clock-radio cheerfully dispensing reveille:

(53)

After the familiar tune ended, the announcer commented: 'Yes, it's true; it IS time to wake up.' Now, what has been asserted to be true here? The proposition (abbreviated) in 53? Hardly: there is no proposition there, just a bunch of measures in search of a bugle. (As Georgia Green has reminded me, reveille does have words-indeed several alternate sets of words; but we cannot infer from the announcer's comment that he is transderivationally alluding to any particular set of words, or in fact that he even KNOWS any set of words.) Rather, the playing of reveille, given certain non-linguistic conventions in our culture, can be performed with the intention of indirectly conveying the proposition that it is time for the reluctant hearer to awaken. It is this conveyed proposition which is being called true; the prior indirect assertion of this proposition is further illustrated by the anaphoric de-stressing in the radio announcer's utterance.18

(b) They had a baby SHMAND got married

would be interpretable either atemporally or-on its asymmetric reading-as 'They had a baby and, before that, they had gotten married'.

(iii) The same 'ambiguity' exhibited by and seems to arise in paratactic conjunction, when two clauses describing related events are juxtaposed without any overt connective:

(c) They had a baby. They got married. Grice's alternative position, which I take to be correct, is that (a) is in fact semantically univocal,

but may CONVERSATIONALLY IMPLICATE (through an exploitation of the maxim 'Be orderly') that the events occurred in the order described. The non-existence of a conjunction like SHMAND could then be ascribed to the non-existence of any maxim of the form 'Be disorderly.' Conjunction is thus potentially asymmetric through implicature, in the same way that weak scalar predications are potentially upper-bounded-in both cases, we can cancel or suspend the implicatum if we don't want to set it off:

(d) Some, {if not all I and possibly all}, men are chauvinists. (e) They had a baby and got married, but not necessarily in that order.

We have, then, one more instance of pragmatic ambiguity to add to the list begun in ?2.1. (Wilson 1975:96-9, Schmerling 1975, Gazdar 1979a provide additional support for the Gricean pragmatic line on asymmetric conjunction; McCawley 1981:6-10, Bar-Lev & Palacas 1980 offer ambiguist counterproposals.)

18 There are other cases in the literature in which a proposition that is pragmatically presupposed as part of the 'common ground' can serve as the basis for anaphoric-type de-stressing of material actually uttered for the first time. These include (a)-cf. Morgan 1969-and (b):

(a) How does it feel to be a beautiful girl? [no pragmatic presupposition necessary]

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Parallel to the conjunction and reveille examples just discussed is the phenomenon induced by rhetorical questions of the type which Sadock 1975 has called QUECLARATIVES:

(54) A: Who the hell buys that cockamamie line about pragmatic ambiguity?

B: (a) Yes, that's true. (= Nobody does.) (b) No, that's not necessarily so; there might be something to it.

Unlike the conjunction in 52, neither the reveille nor the queclarative case can involve embedding:

(55) a. I guess I'll have to settle for polyester, because where (the hell) can you find a 100% cotton jumpsuit anymore?

b. *It's not true that where (the hell) can you find a 100% cotton jumpsuit anymore.

But this is presumably caused by syntactic factors: neither melodies nor questions may occur embedded. In effect, the readings of the type described here constitute a 'root' or 'main clause' phenomenon; hence the contrast in 55 between because (which acts like a coordinator with respect to other 'root' phenomena) and the subordinating complementizer that. Crucially, however, what is being negated or affirmed, agreed or disagreed with, in 54B is not the question in 54A-which, like the tune in 53, has no obvious truth value as such (but cf. Karttunen & Peters 1976)-but rather the proposition which A is taken to have pragmatically conveyed.

This suggests the line which I urge for 50, for the conditional cases instan- tiating 32a (e.g. 30'), and for the disjunctive examples 37a and 38: it is not the proposition actually being asserted which is denied, but the assertability of the proposition (along with any associated implicata) conveyed in the context of utterance. Following Kripke, what we must deal with here is a divergence of SPEAKER'S meaning from SENTENCE meaning.'9

(a') How does it FEEL to be a beautiful girl? [pragmatic presupposition: Addressee is a beautiful girl.]

(b) I thought you'd make it (... but you didn't.) [no pragmatic presupposition necessary.]

(b') I THOUGHT you'd make it (... and sure enough you did.) [pragmatic presupposition: Addressee did make it.]

As in the example 53, the material following the stressed element in (a') and (b') is treated as though it had been asserted earlier in the discourse context, and hence is de-stressed. A frequently encountered example of pragmatically-triggered de-stressing is in sportscasters' updates of scores: (c) will receive major stress on 6 if and only if the Red Sox have just scored one or more runs:

(c) [And {that makes it / the score is now} ...] Red Sox 6, Yankees 3. The Yankee score, being old information, counts as material already asserted, and so is de-stressed.

19 Compare Kripke's gloss (256) on an example originally discussed by Linsky and Donnellan. The situation is this:

'Someone sees a woman with a man. Taking the man to be her husband, and observing his attitude towards her, he says, "Her husband is kind to her", and someone else may nod,

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We should note one additional way in which the use of the It is true that preface in ordinary discourse differs from the semantic value of truth predicates. Often, the only felicitous discourse-initiating use of the affirmative formula It is true that is a concessive one. If we begin by affirming It is true that snow is white, rather than merely stating that Snow is white, we normally continue by appending a clause beginning with but ... (An instance of this usage can be found in the text above, immediately following 51c.) I shall not dwell on this phenomenon here, except to suggest that it seems susceptible to a natural conversational explanation (a la Grice 1967), and to note that it gives us one more reason to dissociate the definition of the semantic truth predicate from the behavior of ordinary-language true (cf. G. Lakoff 1975:259 for related discussion).

OTHER METALINGUISTIC OPERATORS

3. If the approach suggested here is correct for negation, it is plausible that the natural language reflexes of other logical operators should come in similar

"Yes, he seems to be." Suppose the man in question is not her husband. Suppose he is her lover, to whom she has been driven precisely by her husband's cruelty.'

On both Fregean and Russellian theories of truth, the statement

(a) Her husband is kind to her comes out false (since the individual actually denoted by the phrase her husband is not in fact kind to his wife)-a result which Donnellan 1978 finds uncongenial. Yet even on the referential reading, Donnellan is not totally confident in assessing (a) as true. Kripke points out that (a) seems to function ambivalently in dialogs like these:

(b) A: Her husband is kind to her. B: No, he isn't. The man you're referring to isn't her husband.

(c) A: Her husband is kind to her. B: He is kind to her but he isn't her husband.

As Kripke notes, 'in the first dialog, the respondent (B) uses "he" to refer to the semantic referent of "her husband" as used by the first speaker (A); in the second dialog, the respondent uses "he" to refer to the speaker's referent.' Since definite pronominalization can 'pick up either a previous semantic reference or a previous speaker's reference', each dialog is equally proper (Kripke, 270). For our purposes, it should also be noted that, as a free alternant of his reply in (c), B could have responded,

(d) Yes, it's true, {that fellow / he} is kind to her. But he's not her husband. Or again, adapting an even more familiar example from Donnellan 1966, we obtain this dialog:

(e) A: The man in the corner drinking a martini is a spy. B: Yes, it's true, he is indeed a spy. But actually, that's water in his martini glass.

Sports pages often provide instances in which the predicate true picks out not the entire proposition literally expressed by a previous utterance, but some sub-assertion within it. Reporting on a postgame interview with quarterback David Woodley of the Miami Dolphins, after they lost the 1983 Super Bowl game, a journalist writes,

'It was suggested to Woodley that when many people remember Super Bowl XVII, they will say the Dolphins lost because David Woodley failed to complete his last nine passes.

'"That's probably true", Woodley said. 'Woodley was not saying it was true that the critics will blame him. He was saying that the

critics will be correct in saying the quarterback lost the game.' (Malcolm Moran, New York Times, 2/1/83)

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pairs, exhibiting metalinguistic uses alongside descriptive ones. This is indeed what we find.

Consider, for example, the extension of logical inclusive disjunction to these examples:

(56) a. Kim is bright, or {even / should I say} brilliant. b. New Haven, or the Elm City, is the pearl of south-central Con-

necticut. c. Is the conductor Bernst[iY]n or Bernst[ay]n?

(cf. The formulator of relativity theory wasn't Einst[iY]n but Einst[ay]n.)

d. The current President has appointed more colored folk-or should I say blacks-to prominent positions ...

e. She deprived her students of a lecture-or (better) spared them a lecture-on the performative hypothesis. (after Wilson 1975)

f. Did Elizabeth have a baby and get married, or did she get married and have a baby? (after Wilson 1975, McCawley 1981)

As Du Bois 1974 notes, a principal source of non-logical disjunction is the phenomenon of intentional mid-sentence correction, as in one reading of 56a,d,e-or in examples like these, from Du Bois (8), where the self-corrections have 'survived presumably careful editing':

(56')a. I can only very briefly set forth my own views, or rather my general attitudes. (Sapir, Language)

b. Let us look at the racial, or rather, racist themes in the argument for population control. (Pohlman, Population: A clash of prophets)

Metalinguistic uses of conditionals include these: (57) a. If you're thirsty, there's some beer in the fridge.

b. If you haven't already heard, Punxsutawny Phil saw his shadow and we're in for six more weeks of winter.

c. If I may say so, you're looking particularly lovely tonight. Here each antecedent clause specifies a sufficient condition for the appropriateness or legitimacy of asserting the consequent, rather than for its truth. As with metalinguistic negation, we can find morpho-syntactic diagnostics for metalinguistic uses of disjunctions and conditionals: note that the disjunctions in 56-56' cannot be paraphrased by either ... or ..., and that the consequent clauses in 57 exclude initial then.

Ducrot (1972:175-8) adds to the familiar cases of 57 another variety of metalinguistic conditional statement, exemplified in sentences which translate as follows:

(58) a. If the Cite is the heart of Paris, the Latin Quarter is its soul. b. If the Bois de Boulogne is the lungs of Paris, the neighborhood

square is its pores. As Ducrot notes, the antecedent in these cases is understood as proposing to justify the metaphor in the main clause (by virtue of accepting the metaphor

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in the antecedent). The sense is 'If you're willing to grant p, you must grant q.'20

Perhaps the closest pragmatic doublet for negation, however, is offered by questions. What are generally labelled ECHO questions (or, following Perlmutter & Soames 1979:589-90, INCREDULITY questions) might, in the present context, be renamed METALINGUISTIC questions. As with the most natural occurrences of metalinguistic negation, echo questions often seem to require a linguistic context in which the original utterance (be it a declarative, an imperative, or itself a question) has been previously uttered within the discourse. Consider the circumstances which might evoke these echo questions:

(59) a. You did WHAT with Sally and Bill? b. Take out the WHAT? c. Do I WHAT?

The distribution of echo questions is determined in accordance with the sentence-type they are used to echo. Echoes of declaratives occur in declarative contexts, echoes of questions in question environments, and so on:

(59') a. John thinks Mary is dating {Fred/wHo?}l *who Mary is dating.

who Mary is dating. b. John wonders *Mary is dating {Fred/wHo?}

where WHO went? And just as metalinguistic negation is impotent to trigger negative polarity items or to incorporate prefixally as descriptive negations do, echo questions-as is well known-fail to exhibit normal interrogative syntax; they neither exhibit wH-fronting nor trigger subject-auxiliary inversion.

There is, then, reason to believe that the existence of parallel metalinguistic/ descriptive splits for other logical operators, rather than supporting the strong monoguist line on negation (as Kempson 1975:184 suggests), in fact reinforces the line on negation urged here. If we are unwilling, in constructing the simplest semantic and syntactic theory, to collapse the or clauses in 56-56' with ordinary inclusive disjunctions, the if clauses in 57-58 with ordinary conditionals (whatever THEY are), and the echo questions of 59-59' with normal wH-questions, we must be equally unwilling to claim that all negations are one.

OTHER APPROACHES TO METALINGUISTIC NEGATION

4. The analysis presented here, on which marked negation is taken to represent a metalinguistic use of the negative operator rather than (as with descriptive negation) a semantic operator which is part of logical form, bears varying degrees of kinship to other accounts of negation which have been presented or defended over the last few years. In this section, some of the more

20 For readers who lack the appropriate Parisian frame of reference, the closest domestic counterpart I could devise is one based on my own hometown: If the docks are the burly forearms of New York, the subways are the pits.

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important of these accounts will be summarized and compared with the view outlined in ?2 above.

4.1. FALSITY AND NEGATION: THE MONOGUIST THESIS REVISITED. We have

briefly noted the tradition embodied in the work of linguists like Jespersen and Giv6n, and of psychologists like Herbert and Eve Clark, in which negative statements are taken as generally marked or complex relative to their corresponding affirmatives. There is also a longstanding philosophical tendency, manifested in somewhat different ways by Kant, Wittgenstein, Searle, and many others, of taking negative statements as constituting a kind of special speech act of denial, on a different level from the corresponding affirmative statement. This tendency, however, has not gone unchallenged. Thus Gale (1970:201) observes that

'Many philosophers have claimed that negation signifies a person's mental act of denying, rejecting, or rebutting a statement that is actually made or envisioned as being made by someone.

But, Gale goes on to point out, this account is not wholly satisfactory. It is simply not true that the statement addressed by a negative must have been either made or envisioned as being made. Furthermore, since positive statements can also be used to deny another's assertion, we can have no general equivalence of the form

(60) It is not the case that S I deny that S. As Gale notes, if the above equivalence held, then (given the principle of

the excluded middle, S V -S) 60'b should be just as necessarily true as 60'a: (60')a. Either it is not the case that S or it is [not the case that it is not]

the case that S.

b. Either I deny that S or I deny that deny that S.

Yet while 60'a is indeed valid, 60'b is not. Furthermore, it does not follow from the right-hand side of 60, as it does from the left, that S is false. Negation, Gale concludes, is part of the propositional content of the statement in which it occurs, rather than marking the pragmatic function of expressing the speaker's propositional attitude toward some affirmative statement that was (or might have been) made.

Along the same lines, Geach (76) warns against the 'widespread mistake' of assuming that

'the negation of a statement is a statement that that statement is false, and thus is a statement ABOUT the original statement and logically secondary to it'.

Geach uses the behavior of non-declaratives to show that this approach is mistaken:

'"Do not open the door!" is a command on the same level as "Open the door!" and does not mean (say) "Let the statement that you open the door be false!"'

While the negative predications may be linguistically more complex than their corresponding affirmatives, they are on the same level logically: 'we must ...

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reject the view that a negative predication needs to be backed by an affirmative one' (78-9).

Both Gale's and Geach's caveats are well-taken; however, they seem to offer no explanation for why luminaries like Kant and Wittgenstein might have been deceived into drawing their distinctions between the character of negative and affirmative statements.21 Nor is any connection drawn between the treatment of negation as a propositional operator and the properties of morpho-syntactic markedness so characteristic of negation in natural language.

The solution to this stand-off, I suggest, is the recognition that truth-conditional semantics does indeed (as argued by Gale and Geach) contain a propositional negative operator, corresponding to descriptive negation in the object language-but that not all occurrences of natural language negation can be represented in this way. As we have seen, a need clearly exists to accommodate a 'denial' use of negation; but once we have weaned ourselves from the strong monoguist thesis, there is no reason to expect the equivalence in 60 to hold.

In any case, 'I deny that S'-as in 60-is too restrictive a gloss for the metalanguage-level use of negation; we have observed a number of cases where a speaker uses metalinguistic negation not strictly to DENY S (or to call S false) but rather, more broadly, to REJECT S, or its implicata, or the way it was uttered. As remarked in fn. 13, Dummett (328-30) is on the right track in characterizing this use of negation as 'a means of expressing an unwillingness to assert "A" ' without necessarily constituting a willingness to deny 'A'. However, Dum- mett's neo-Fregean representations, utilizing scopal distinctions to account for the difference between the two ways of taking negation, may not be sufficiently general; '-(not A)' is unobjectionable for descriptive (propositional) negation, but it is not clear that a representation like 'Not(-A)' can be interpreted co- herently for all the cases of 17-23.

Some of the recent radically monoguist theories of negation suffer from the flaw noted by Gale and by Geach: the failure to distinguish negation from falsity, and to recognize that to call a statement false is to say something (on a metalinguistic level) ABOUT that statement, but to apply (descriptive) negation to a proposition is simply to form another proposition which may itself be true or false. Thus Allwood, in his seminal univocal analysis of negation, remarks (43-5),

'We have in all cases taken negation to be the same basic semantic operation, indicating that a certain state of affairs is not a fact. We have taken negation to have exactly the properties of logical negation: always giving the predication it operates on an opposite truth value ... Negation has the same basic function as falsity. To negate a certain statement or to say of the same statement that it is false is logically to do the same thing, namely to claim that the state of affairs described in the statement does not obtain.'

Allwood's identification of negation and falsity is precisely the target of the warnings issued by Gale and by Geach.

21 It should be noted that one luminary, Frege, consistently treated negative sentences as simple assertions of negative propositions and explicitly warned against confusing a lexical form, i.e. negation, with a speech-act function, i.e. denial (Frege 1919, as called to my attention by Jay Atlas).

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Kempson's more sophisticated monoguist treatment of negation also iden- tifies descriptive negation in natural language with 'the falsity operator of logic' (1975:95); but from the context of this identification, she may be referring elliptically to the propositional operator whose semantics corresponds to falsity, i.e. a negative expression OF the language rather than a negative comment ABOUT it. She goes on to present and challenge a variety of presuppositionalist views of ambiguous negation in which external or denial negation is taken as a semantic operator. Since I agree with Kempson that her 'denial' negation cannot be a semantic operator, and is indeed 'one of the uses to which negative sentences could be put' (99), I do not wish to rebut the gist of her account. But she takes this correct observation as a license to ignore those cases of 'denial' negation whose behavior does not naturally fall within the proper bounds for logical negation-or to subsume them within the general category of propositional negation, as Allwood does. Yet as we have seen, no single logical notion of negation as a truth-functional operator can collect all natural language uses of negation.

While Kempson concedes that 'marked (contrastive stress) interpretations of negative sentences' may generally function as denials, she argues that 'this correspondence ... does not carry over to compound sentences' of the type illustrated by the citation from Strawson mentioned in fn. 1 and repeated here:

(61) Neither Aristotelian nor Russellian rules give the exact logic of any expression of ordinary language; for ordinary language has no exact logic.

But, in general, Kempson's citations of marked, 'presupposition'-canceling negation (cf. Kempson 1975:68, 78, 86-7)-as Kiefer (1977:252-3) points out- 'can only be conceived of as answers to a previous utterance.' An example which Kiefer cites is this:

(62) Edward didn't regret that Margaret had failed because he knew it wasn't true.

Kiefer's formulation, needless to add, is totally consistent with the metalinguistic approach to marked negation.

The most sophisticated, and probably the most radical, of the contemporary monoguists on negation is Atlas. While his position has shifted perceptibly over the years (from 1974 through 1977, 1979 [cf. also Atlas & Levinson] to 1980, 1981), as he has considered a progressively wider range of data, he has con- tinued to maintain that negation is ambiguous neither in scope nor in meaning (cf. ?1.2 above), even when that position has pushed him into the somber conclusion that no set-theoretical semantic theory can do justice to negation- and hence to natural language in general. Atlas concludes (1981:127), on the basis of the kind of data presented in ?2 above, that

'the range of interpretation includes statements that are internal negations, external negations, and metalinguistic predications. Not-sentences are semantically less specified, and theoreti- cally more complex, than the tradition in logical theory has heretofore recognized.'

It should be clear that I share Atlas' misgivings about logical theories that either ignore metalinguistic uses of negation, or take them as a subcase of a

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special semantic external negation operator; but I cannot agree that the appropriate solution lies in placing all our negative eggs into one 'radically un- derspecified' basket. To put it another way, the evidence in ?2 does not support Atlas' radical move of throwing out the model-theoretic baby with the ambiguist bathwater.

Ambiguist treatments of negation are not entirely absent from modern logic. To capture the behavior of external negation, Bergmann 1977, 1981 differentiates the unmarked auxiliary negation 'not A' from a formal negative operator which affects, not truth value per se, but 'anomaly' value. Within Bergmann's 'two-dimensional logic', the truth/falsity axis intersects the anomaly/non-anomaly axis, producing four distinct possible assignments. The ordinary internal negation of A will be true just in case the corresponding external negation is true and A is non-anomalous.

As Atlas notes, however, Bergmann's system inherits empirical and theoretical problems from previous ambiguist theories, in addition to some which are created by the innovations in her account. Double negation no longer holds for internal negation; furthermore, on Bergmann's projection rules, a conditional like the following comes out true but anomalous:

(63) If there's a king of France, then he's bald. Yet 'intuitively there is no linguistic anomaly in this sentence at all' (Atlas 1981:126-7).

For our purposes, an even more fundamental flaw exists in Bergmann's account of negation: there is no obvious way for the 'anomaly' treatment to extend from negative statements involving sortal incorrectness (Bergmann 1977) or presupposition failure-as in the classic king of France cases-to those involving conversational implicata, grammar, style or register, phonetics etc. It is these cases which most clearly demand a metalinguistic treatment outside the bounds of logical semantics (one- or two-dimensional).22

As we have already seen, similar problems arise in an account which is in some ways rather congenial to Bergmann's. Karttunen & Peters (1979:47) correctly describe their 'contradiction negation' as having 'a special function in

22 It is worth noting that the sortal incorrectness (a.k.a. selectional violation) examples discussed in Bergmann 1977 constitute much stronger candidates for presuppositionality and semantic external negation than the referential cases (e.g. the non-existent king of France) on which most philosophers and linguists have concentrated their firepower. It is more compelling-although, as Bergmann and others have pointed out, still not necessary-to diagnose sentences like (a) and (b) as suffering from a terminal truth-value gap than it is to perform the equivalent diagnosis for the king of France examples:

(a) The theory of relativity is (is not) blue. (b) Socrates is (is not) a prime number.

The king of France is the kind of thing that can be bald (exx. 1-2 are each true in some possible worlds), but the theory of relativity is simply not the kind of thing that can ever-in any possible world-be blue. Significantly, as Bergmann (1977:65) notes, the diagnostic test of ?2.4 works as expected in the sortal incorrectness cases, ruling out the external (i.e. metalinguistic) interpretation:

(c) The theory of relativity is {ninterested in classical music. [#uninterestedJ

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discourse' of contradicting 'something that the addressee has just said, implied, or implicitly accepted'. This may be a necessary condition for a negation to be functioning metalinguistically, but it is not sufficient: many descriptive negations could be characterized in the same terms (cf. Atlas 1980). Furthermore, K&P stipulate that

'contradiction negation differs semantically from ordinary negation only by virtue of having a broader target ... [it] pertains to the total meaning of its target sentence, ignoring the distinction between truth conditions and conventional implicatures.

This fatally overlooks just how broad the target of marked (metalinguistic) negation can be.

One additional contemporary account of negation, more neo-monoguist than neo-ambiguist, is worth mentioning here. Lehrer & Lehrer distinguish two rival interpretations of the relation between scalar operators like good and excellent: the 'hyponymy' interpretation, on which good is a superordinate term for the category containing excellent, and the 'incompatible' interpretation, on which the predicates good and excellent are mutually inconsistent. They point out that 64a seems to support the former analysis, and 64b the latter (cf. the discussion of 34a-b in ?2.3 above):

(64) a. This wine is good-it's even excellent. (L&L 15) b. This wine is not good, it's excellent. (L&L 14)

They opt for the hyponymy interpretation, based largely on the acceptability of 65-a construction which excludes 'true incompatibles', as seen in 66:

(65) That wine is not only good; it's excellent. (L&L 16) (66) a. *That's not only a cat, it's a dog. (L&L 17)

b. That's not only a car, it's a Cadillac. (L&L 18) I agree with the Lehrers' conclusion that excellent is a hyponym of good (cf. Horn 1972, 1973, Gazdar 1979a,b); but I cannot accept their implication that the negative predication not good in the first clause of 64b is to be regarded as somehow elliptical for not only good as in 65. Given the scalar nature of the relation between good and excellent-i.e., that X is excellent unilaterally entails X is good-64b and 65 will in fact convey the same information; the same point was made in ?2.4 in connection with the examples of 42. But ONLY those instances of metalinguistic negation with an upper-bounding conversational implicatum arising from the maxim of Quantity will share this characteristic.

Thus there is no way to extend L & L's elliptical analysis of 64b to conventional implicature cases like 12, phonetic cases like 18a, morphological cases like 18b, or stylistic or connotative cases like those in 20-21:

(67) a. ??I didn't just manage to trap two mongeese-I managed to trap two mongooses. (#: 18b)

b. ??For a pessimist like him, the glass isn't only half full-it's half empty. ($- 21d)

c. He's not only meeting a woman this evening-he's meeting his wife. (OK, but 4 22")

Even among those cases which do involve cancellation of a quantity-based implicatum, the syntax may render a L & L-style paraphrase awkward or im-

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possible: (67') ?*Maggie isn't just either patriotic or quixotic-she's both. (cf. 37a)

L & L correctly characterize the 'more than good' reading of the negation in 64b as requiring that 'the intonation contour ... remain high instead of dropping, signaling a clarification to follow'-but this same characterization applies across the board to ALL instances of metalinguistic negation, whether or not they are paraphrasable in the manner of 65. In short, taking metalinguistic not to stand for not only is as inadequate as taking it to represent not true.

4.2. METALINGUISTIC NEGATION AND 'NIGATION MITALINGUISTIQUE'. AS noted above, both the concept and label of metalinguistic negation are borrowed from Ducrot 1972, 1973. For Ducrot 1972:37ff., descriptive negation constitutes a comment on facts, and preserves presuppositions.23 Metalinguistic (or polemic) negation comments on utterances and challenges presuppositions.

In Ducrot's system, presuppositions (presupposes) are distinguished on the one hand from assertions (poses) and on the other from rhetorical implicata (sous-entendus). An intermediate formal language (which I shall call LD) is introduced (Ducrot 1972, ?5) for representing statements of ordinary language in such a way as to allow presuppositions and assertions to be distinguished in the predicate calculus translations of LD formulas. The notation XIY represents a 'predicative pair', where X and Y can be filled by atomic or complex predicates. Any LD expression of the form XIY(ai, ..., an) will then correspond to two predicate calculus expressions: one (the translation of X(al, ..., a,)) for the presupposition, the other (the translation of Y(al, ..., an)) for the assertion.

Natural language operators (only, some) and negation are represented in LD by 'copulative operations' which convert one predicative pair into another (Ducrot 1972:147). Two such copulative operations and NEG (presupposition- preserving descriptive negation) are REF (refutational, i.e. metalinguistic, negation). Their effect is indicated as follows (where non-bold-face NEG eventually translates into predicate calculus '-' and ET into '&' or 'A'):

(68) a. NEG(XIY) = X NEG Y b. REF(XIY) = - I NEG (ET (X,Y))

It will be immediately noted that the distinction between 68a-b directly (mu- tatis mutandis) prefigures that between ordinary and 'contradiction' negation in the work of Karttunen & Peters, discussed in ?1.3. The marked negation of

23 It is often difficult to determine just how a given expression may be (descriptively) negated; e.g.,

(a) John, too, is coming to the party. (b) Even John passed the exam.

However, Ducrot suggests that we have an intuitive sense of what the expression presupposes, and this guides us to discover what constitutes its descriptive, presupposition-preserving negation. Thus the descriptive negations of (c)-(d) can be given in (c')-(d') respectively (Ducrot 1972:105):

(c) We have finally arrived. (c') We haven't arrived yet. (d) For a Frenchman, he knows a lot of logic. (d') Even for a Frenchman, he doesn't know much logic.

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68b, as in 15b, brings the presupposed (conventionally implicated) material within the logical scope of negation; but ordinary descriptive negation, in 68a as in 15a, respects presupposed (conventionally implicated) material by according it a kind of logical transparency. (Note that the presuppositional component in the output of 68b is empty, just as the conventional implicature component of 15b is vacuous.)

But we have already seen that this scopal distinction does not generalize to the entire range of possible applications of metalinguistic negations discussed in ?2; in particular, such foci of negation as morphological, syntactic, and phonetic form, conversational implicature, register, and connotative meaning are not part of logical form, and cannot be readily plugged into the format of 68b. Ducrot does acknowledge a 'rhetorical' function of marked negation, to deny the 'sous-entendus' associated with a given utterance (corresponding to Grice's conversational implicata); however, his representations and account of 'la negation metalinguistique' do not do justice to the protean character of metalinguistic negation in French (cf. 19) or English.

Nevertheless, the account of metalinguistic (a.k.a. polemic) negation offered in various works by Ducrot and his colleagues (Ducrot 1972:37 ff., 1973:124- 5, Anscombre & Ducrot 1977) is certainly helpful and quite suggestive. Thus Ducrot correctly observes that (as noted above, following Grice and Dummett; cf. ?2.2 and fn. 13) the negation attached to conditionals tends to be interpreted only as a metalinguistic device indicating the speaker's unwillingness to assert the conditional. Elsewhere, Ducrot points out that metalinguistic or polemic negation corresponds to a special negative speech act-a way of rebutting a previously uttered affirmative.

In an empirical study, Heldner expands on the role of Ducrot's metalinguistic negation and its interaction with scalar predications (cf. Ducrot & Barbault's essay in Ducrot 1973). A sample citation involving metalinguistic negation is

(69) Jules ne chante pas bien, il chante comme un dieu. 'Jules doesn't sing well, he sings like a god.'

Here 'the speaker makes it clear that bien must be replaced by a more adequate term'-one not necessarily (as with descriptive negation) below bien on the relevant scale, but possibly higher or on a different scale entirely (Heldner, 92; cf. the Appendix, below, for related discussion).

As Heldner (65) points out, Ducrot and his colleagues originally took the descriptive/metalinguistic negation distinction to be morphologically neutralized in French; but more recent work has suggested a candidate for an unambiguous sign of the latter. For Gross 1977, the use of non (or non pas), immediately preceding the negated item, can only be interpreted 'contrastively'-where Gross's 'contrastive' negation corresponds to the metalinguistic or polemic negation of Ducrot and his colleagues. (Anscombre & Ducrot independently cite non as an unambiguously polemic negation.) Thus the negation in 70a MAY be interpreted contrastively, but that in 70b MUST be (Gross, 47):

(70) a. Max n'a pas abattu un if, mais (il a abattu) ce pin. 'Max didn't fell a yew, but (he felled) this pine.'

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b. Max a abattu non pas un if, mais (*il a abattu) ce pin. 'Max felled not a yew, but (*he felled) this pine.'

(Note that reduction in the mais clause is obligatory in 70b; this is discussed in the Appendix.)

Gross (51 ff.) constructs an argument for distinguishing contrastive from ordinary negation, based on the distribution of partitive de + article vs. simple de. He judges 71 a to be necessarily contrastive, understood with a continuation (... il boit autre chose); but 71b is understood non-contrastively:

(71) a. Max ne boit pas du vin 'Max doesn't drink wine ' 'Max doesn't drink wine.' b. Max ne boit pas de vin Gross finds that non (pas), as expected, occurs only with de + article:

(72) a. Max a bu du vin, non (pas) {de l'eau / *d'eau}. 'Max drank wine, not water.'

b. Max a bu non (pas) {dul*de} vin, mais de l'eau. 'Max drank not wine, but water.'

Clefts, too, force the contrastive reading on negation, and hence demand the article:

(73) Ce n'est pas {dul*de} vin qu'il boit, mais de l'eau. 'It isn't wine that he drinks, but water.'

If, as is reasonable, we take the use of de without the article to constitute a classic negative polarity item in French (cf. Gaatone 1971, Horn 1978a,b), then Gross's correlation of de + article with contrastive (i.e. metalinguistic or polemic) negation will define a diagnostic for French parallel to the observation for English (Karttunen & Peters 1979, Linebarger 1981; cf. ?1.3 above) that external or contradiction negation-and, by extension, the generalized metalinguistic operator (cf. ?2.1)-fails to trigger negative polarity items. But the evidence is a bit murkier than Gross intimates. For Heldner (77), both 74a and 74b are acceptable in isolation:

(74) a. Je ne bois pas du vin, (*mais) je bois de la grenadine. b. Je ne bois pas de vin, mais je bois de la grenadine.

The former is interpreted as specific in time and space (= 'I am not drinking wine, I'm drinking grenadine'); the latter is taken as habitual (= 'I don't drink wine, but I drink grenadine'). Crucially, however, Heldner agrees with Gross's findings as to the unacceptability of the polarity item in the unambiguously metalinguistic negation of 72b.24

4.3. WILSON ON NEGATION. The English-language account of negation bearing the greatest kinship to the approach taken in ?2 is probably that of Wilson. She takes as her primary data a wide variety of uses of negation, many derived

24 As carefully documented by Danell (1974;425), much more is going on here than meets the eye. The interplay of factors determining the distribution of pas du X (or pas un X) vs. pas de X is extremely complex, hinging on such variables as the scope of negation, the modality of the sentence, the meaning of the verb, the nature of the complement(s), and the 'degree of existence' of the object focused by negation.

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from Grice, which are not reducible to garden-variety descriptive negation, including the following (cf. Wilson, 149 ff.):

(75) a. I'm not happy: I'm ecstatic. b. The next Prime Minister won't be Heath: it will be Heath or Wil-

son. (= 49 above) c. I don't love Johnny: I love Johnny or Billy.

Although the passage that follows (150), inspired by examples like those in 75, does exhibit the error of identifying ordinary descriptive negation with falsity, as decried by Geach (cf. ?4.1), we are given a clear description of why natural language negation cannot always be reduced to the familiar one-place logical connective:

'To assert that not-p (or to deny that p) cannot be the same thing as to assert that p is false. It may also be to assert that p is inadequate to the facts without necessarily being false: it may be too weak, or too strong, or misleading ... Once negation and falsity are distinguished, semantic statements of entailment and contradiction could be made in terms of falsity, while the treatment of negation could include, but go beyond, relations of falsity alone.'

Given the existence of examples like 75, there must be non-truth-functional aspects to the interpretation of (at least some uses of) negation-instances in which the value of not-p cannot be simply a function of the value of p. In these examples, we see that the falsity of p is a sufficient but not a necessary reason for asserting not-p: given that uttering p might suggest q, and that one does not wish to suggest q, one might say 'not-p' (Wilson, 151).25

25 Kempson and her students, in recent published and unpublished work (cf. Kempson 1975, 1982, Cormack 1980, Burton-Roberts 1984) have drawn a rather different conclusion from the existence of examples of the Grice-Wilson variety. Consider negations like 75a, or the following:

(a) Justin didn't paint three squares, he painted four. Cormack (p. 6) points out that these appear paradoxical: 'if Justin painted four squares, he certainly painted three; if someone is ecstatic they are certainly happy, and so on.' Furthermore, as Burton- Roberts observes, (b) is apparently paradoxical (relevant to standard modal systems) and yet is acceptable:

(b) It's not possible that mammals suckle their young, you ignoramus, it's downright necessary.

Note that incorporation is impossible here, as the diagnostic test in ?2.4 predicts: (b') *It's impossible that mammals suckle their young, you ignoramus, it's downright nec-

essary. We have already considered and rejected Lehrer & Lehrer's elliptical approach to Cormack and

Burton-Roberts's 'paradoxical negations' (cf. ?4.1). Burton-Roberts opts for a different analysis, one in which the weak scalar element (possible, three, happy etc.) is taken as semantically ambiguous between the 'one-sided' reading, which is lower-bounded only, and the 'two-sided' reading, which is lower- and upper-bounded:

'As Cormack points out, the alternative to this is to invoke a special (denial, quotational) negation to handle the phenomenon (an alternative that she rejects in favor of treating implicatures semantically).'

But as argued by Horn 1984, this move by the members of what I call the London School of Parsimony-in which a strictly monoguist line on negation is offset by a radically ambiguist line on scalar predications-is not compelling. Note that the London School framework generates an infinitude of logical ambiguities: one for each weak or intermediate scalar value, including every

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What Wilson does not make clear is just how the fact that some instances of not-p count as 'refusals to assert' p is to be related to the fact that OTHER instances of not-p do contain negation as an object-language connective, trans- lating into logical form as '-'. What is lacking here is precisely a full characterization of the distinction between negation as a one-place truth-functional connective (NOT equivalent to falsity, for the reasons noted by Geach) and negation as a metalinguistic objection to some aspect of a previous utterance.

In particular, just as not all uses of metalinguistic negation can be analysed as semantic external negation-or as negation outside the scope of a semantic operator TRUE-it is also the case (although on a subtler level) that not all the cases explored in ?2 can be taken as 'refusals to assert' a given proposition (or sentence; Wilson is not entirely clear on just what p stands for in the passages cited above). Her characterization collects those instances where negation attaches to conversational implicata, along with those involving conventional implicata or presuppositions (notions whose utility Wilson challenges); but it does not directly generalize to examples like 18a-b or 19, where the objection is not to the ASSERTION of a given proposition (much less to the truth of that proposition), but rather to the way that the proposition was reified into a sentence, or the way that the sentence was uttered. The use of negation to signal that a speaker finds a given proposition unassertable (cf. Grice 1967, Dummett 1973, Ducrot 1973, Grim 1981, as well as Wilson 1975) is appropriately more inclusive than the external negation operators of the logical ambiguists (Karttunen & Peters 1979, Bergmann 1981, and Linebarger 1981), but is itself a proper subcase of the generalized use of negation as a metalinguistic operator.

Ironically, it is Wilson herself who cites and attacks two alternative views of marked negative statements-which, while not fully fleshed out, more closely anticipate the notion of metalinguistic negation than anything in her own work or in the dissections of negative sentences at the hands of other logicians, philosophers, and linguists. The relevant excerpts, from Fillmore 1969 and Kiparsky & Kiparsky 1970, emanate from the heady period immediately following the discovery by generative linguists of those great presuppositional vistas and swamps; as is typical of that period, they combine keen

cardinal number. Having argued against just such ambiguist analyses (those of Aristotle's De In- terpretatione, of Hamilton 1860, and of Smith 1969), I remain reluctant to abandon the view set out in Horn 1972, 1973 (cf. also Grice 1967, Gazdar 1979a,b), according to which scalar operators are semantically unambiguous, but build in a potential pragmatic ambiguity, based on whether the context induces a generalized quantity-based implicature (cf. ?2.3 above). My reluctance is rein- forced on the one hand by the demonstration (Horn 1984) that privative ambiguity cannot simply be argued away-a step which represents a cornerstone in the London School's approach-and on the other hand by the arguments in the present paper. I have tried to show that a pragmatic ambiguity can be motivated for negation, not only in the scalar cases under discussion here, but in a wide range of examples for which the considerations specified by Cormack, Burton-Roberts, and Kempson are irrelevant. The 'alternative' rejected by Cormack in the passage cited above in fact offers the most general and most elegant account of 'paradoxical' and related uses of negation, while preserving the Gricean line on scalar 'ambiguities'.

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insight with a certain lack of rigor and precision: 'Uses of the verb chase presuppose that the entity identified as the direct object is moving fast. Uses of the verb escape presuppose that the entity identified by the subject noun-phrase was contained somewhere by force previous to the time of focus. These presuppositions, as expected, are unaffected by sentence negation:

rchased (58) The dog didn't chase the cat.

(59) He t escaped from the tower. tdidn't escape J It seems to me that sentences like 60 and 61 are partly comments on the appropriateness of the words chase and escape for the situations being described. These are sentences that would most naturally be used in contexts in which the word chase or escape had just been uttered:

(60) I didn't "chase" the thief; as it happened, he couldn't get his car started. (61) I didn't "escape" from the prison; they released me.' (Fillmore, 381-2)

'If you want to deny a presupposition, you must do it explicitly: Mary didn't CLEAN the room; it wasn't dirty. Abe didn't REGRET that he had forgotten; he had remembered.

The second clause casts the negative of the first into a different level; it's not the straightforward denial of an event or situation, but rather the denial of the appropriateness of the word in question [in small capitals above]. Such negations sound best with the inappropriate word stressed.' (Kiparsky & Kiparsky, 351)

These passages are quoted by Wilson (84) in the course of her blistering attack on all extant presuppositionalist theories, including those of Fillmore and the Kiparskys. Her objections to the views illustrated here have more to do, I think, with her skepticism about the viability of semantic (and pragmatic) notions of presupposition than with the metalinguistic line on so-called 'external' negation; she also (quite properly) attacks two of the weaker candidates for presuppositional status, Fillmore's bachelor and the Kiparsky's clean.

In assuming that marked negation can only be used to deny 'presuppositions', Wilson may or may not be faithful to what Fillmore and the Kiparskys had in mind. In any case, I have argued for a different account of the metalinguistic use of negation-one which strikes me as entirely compatible with more recent theories of presuppositional phenomena, including the context-cancelable presuppositions of Gazdar 1979a,b and the ordered entailments of Wilson & Sper- ber 1979.

Note, however, that both the excerpts above, from Fillmore and from Ki- parsky & Kiparsky, specifically allude not only to the fact that metalinguistic negation is used to object to an earlier utterance as inappropriate-rather than to judge a proposition previously expressed as false-but also that it occurs (as does any metalinguistic operator) on 'a different level', i.e. as a predication ABOUT the object language rather than WITHIN it. Moreover, while Wilson correctly recognizes that we cannot define all instances of external or presupposition-canceling negation as 'denials of appropriateness', as the Kiparskys seem to believe (Wilson, 84-5), their notion does provide a closer approxi- mation to the general phenomenon of metalinguistic negation than Wilson's own view of marked negation as a refusal to assert a given proposition.

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CONCLUDING REMARKS

5. I have argued here that marked negation is a reflex of an extended metalinguistic use of the negative operator in English and other languages. Negative morphemes generally allow (in principle) both descriptive and metalinguistic functions; and the context often serves-as is usual with pragmatic ambiguity- to select one of these uses as the more plausible or salient.

In some cases, a particular morphological realization of negation may in fact force or exclude a particular understanding. (Again, this is a frequent occurrence in the realm of pragmatic ambiguity: cf. Zwicky & Sadock 1975, Horn & Bayer 1984.) Thus, as we saw in ?4.2, Fr. non (pas), placed immediately before the item in the focus of negation, must be interpreted metalinguistically. However, Korean may offer an instance of one morphological negation which is unambiguously descriptive, as against another which may be interpreted either descriptively or metalinguistically. The two constructions in question are the 'short form' an(i), placed before the verb, and the 'long form' an(i) hada (literally 'not do'), placed after the verb stem suffixed by the nominalizer -cil-ji. Thus, corresponding to a basic affirmative sentence like 76a, we have the short-form negative 76b and the long-form negative 76c:

(76) a. Mica ka canta 'Mica sleeps.' b. Mica ka an(i) canta 'Mica does not sleep.' c. Mica ka ca-ci ani hantaj

The issue is whether 76b-c, and other frames in which these constructions function, differ in meaning or use-and, if so, how. Kuno (1980:162-3) finds that the two constructions are either interchangeable or differ only in emphasis; others find a subtle difference, in that the former is a 'verb negation' and the latter a 'sentence negation'. This distinction, as Kuno explicates it, is reminiscent of (but not identical to) the internal/external dichotomy we have discussed.

Other researchers have taken different, often conflicting (if not internally inconsistent) positions. Choi 1983 considers several possibilities raised in these studies, and concludes that the closest match for the two Korean constructions within the Western literature on negation is Aristotle's contrary vs. contradic- tory negation (cf. Horn 1972, 1978a). In any case, Choi's data indicate that the preverbal short form is always used descriptively, while the long form is not restricted to metalinguistic uses-and indeed often 'fills in' for the distribu- tionally defective short form when the syntax demands. If the choice to use long-form negation is often interpreted metalinguistically in those contexts which would have permitted the short form, this interpretive tendency may well be grounded in the pragmatic 'least effort' factors explored insightfully by McCawley 1978.

An additional factor relevant to the Korean case is the restricted scope often associated with the unmarked negative form in verb-final languages. Kuno notes that the scope of the Japanese negative -na-i is generally limited to the immediately preceding verb (although quantifiers can 'escape' this restriction,

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and come within the scope of a non-contiguous negation). The normal Turkish negation -mA- is similarly restricted, with the suppletive periphrastic form degil showing up in contrastive and other contexts.26

Whatever the details of the behavior of negation in specific verb-final languages (or recalcitrant languages of other typologies), the over-all pattern seems confirmed: no language contains two negative operators corresponding exactly to descriptive and marked negation, whether the latter is characterized as an external semantic operator or (as urged here) a metalinguistic use of basic negation. At the same time, every language contains at least one negative mor- pheme which can be used either descriptively (to form a negative proposition) or metalinguistically (to object to a previous utterance).

One issue remaining is the directionality of the relationship between descriptive and metalinguistic uses of negation: which use is primary and which derivative? Or do both uses branch off separately from some more basic, un- differentiated notion? I have little to contribute on this point, except to note that the connection is explainable in either direction. Some evidence from acquisition tends to indicate that, at least in ontogenetic development, the metalinguistic use is prior; the truth-functional use is a later specialization. Fraiberg (1959:62-6) has written eloquently of the power and autonomy which young children associate with their first uses of the magic No; negative utterances

26 Cf. McGloin 1982 for a discussion of other considerations relevant to the interpretation of Japanese negative sentences, in particular the interaction of contrastive negation and the topic marker wa. She cites this three-way distinction in English (Horn 1978a: 137, adapted from Jespersen 1924):

(a) She isn't pretty. (= less than pretty) (a') She isn't (ust) pretty, she is beautiful. (= more than pretty) (a") She isn't pretty, but she is intelligent. (= other than pretty)

McGloin notes that the unmarked (descriptive) 'less than' reading can occur whether or not the scalar element is suffixed by wa. Thus both (b) and (c) may be read as conveying that it is 'less than', i.e. cooler than, hot:

(b) Atsuku na-i hot NEG-PRES

(c) Atsuku wa na-i 'It isn't hot.' hot TOP NEG-PRES

But only (b) can be given the non-scalar 'other than' interpretation (e.g. 'It's not hot but it is dirty.') By contrast, McGloin reports that neither (b) nor (c) can be read in the manner of English metalinguistic scalar negations (e.g. (a') above, 17, 34b, 64b, 75), where the negation focuses on the upper-bounding implicature associated with weak scalar predications. In order to get such a reading, a periphrastic form must be employed:

(d) Atsui dokoroka nietagit-te i-ru yo. hot far.from boiling be-PRES

'It's far from being hot: it's boiling.' (e) Atsui nante yuu mon ja na-i. Nietagit-te i-ru yo.

say 'It's not something you can call hot. It's boiling.' (McGloin, 57-8)

(Cf. also Davison 1978 for a study of some pragmatic factors bearing on the issue of negative scope in verb-final languages.)

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may well accompany the very behavior being abjured or denied, since negation constitutes a 'political gesture', indeed a 'declaration of independence' for the toddler. Such uses of negation, however we may analyse them in terms of the adult language, are clearly not truth functions. However, for what it is worth, Rumbaugh & Gill (1977:169-70) report that the chimp Lana, having been taught the propositional, truth-functional (descriptive) use of negation as part of her computer-based symbolic repertoire of 'Yerkish', spontaneously innovated what can only be viewed as metalinguistic uses of the same negative operator. Of course, even if we conclude that the generalized metalinguistic use of negation as a sign of objection or refusal is learned earlier than its logical, truth- functional use, it does not follow that this order of development should be associated with any logical asymmetry in the account we give for negation (or, analogously, for the other operators) in an idealized competence model of the adult language.

I have maintained in this paper that conditions on truth must be kept distinct from conditions on assertability, and that more explanatory burden should be shifted from the former onto the latter. I have also argued that, while there is indeed only one semantic negation operator in English and other languages, the ordinary truth-functional interpretation of this operator motivates it for an extended use as a general metalinguistic sign of rejection or objection, leveled against the choice of a particular object-language expression or the manner in which that expression was overtly realized. I have tried to pinpoint some of the linguistic correlates associated with metalinguistic and descriptive negation, in support of the view that all negative tokens can be assigned to one of these two basic types.

In reply to the query posed by the title of Atlas 1981, 'Is not logical?', some have answered 'yes' and others (including Atlas himself) 'no'. I conclude that the only full and complete answer must be 'sometimes', i.e. when it is functioning descriptively rather than metalinguistically. Neither the monoguist nor the ambiguist approach to the data we have considered can deal successfully with the unity and diversity of the phenomenon of metalinguistic negation.

How then are we to represent the effect of the metalinguistic use of negation within a formal theory of natural language discourse?27 This is a good question,

27 One consequence of the proposal to eliminate so-called (semantic) 'external' negation is that we are free to adopt whichever theory of descriptions (or of factive predicates) best fits the facts, ignoring the role of negation as a 'presupposition-canceler'. The approach embodying a pragmatic distinction between descriptive and metalinguistic uses of negation is neutral with respect to those issues which divided Strawson from Russell, or Gazdar from Karttunen & Peters. We should not be surprised, however, if the formal semantics of the resultant theory turns out fairly conservative. When the function of negation as a plug for presuppositions and implicatures is removed from logical semantics, then the motivation for semantic presuppositions, for truth-value gaps, and for supernumerary non-bivalent truth values diminishes, if it doesn't disappear entirely. In contrast, the conversationalist line (favored at times by Grice, Wilson, and Kempson) on explaining away presuppositions-in particular, the definite description and factive cases-may prove ultimately inadequate, as argued by Soames 1976 and by Kiefer (1977, ?4). The jury, despite the new evidence it may have received, is evidently still out.

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but one which cannot be directly addressed here. The formulation of its answer would, and I hope will, lead to a future paper, perhaps one which takes the present work as its departure point.

APPENDIX

Another correlate of the metalinguistic/descriptive split manifested by natural language negation is found in the distributional characteristics of concessive and contrastive but conjunctions. We have seen that metalinguistic uses of negation tend to occur in contrastive environments, and the English representation par excellence is but. One typical occurrence of metalinguistic negation is in phrases of the form not X but Y, functioning for many purposes as a single constituent. Y here is proposed metalinguistically as the appropriate substitution (or, following Anscombre & Ducrot, RECTIFICATION) for X, on any grounds whatever; it is, as usual, irrelevant that the rejected utterance containing X may have expressed a true proposition.

We often find that not X but Y may be acceptable in frames where not X is not, as in Ala, or- even more clearly-in Alb:

f?not three children. (Al) a. We have not three but four children.

not three children but four.

b *Not Lee [ Not Lee but Kim wonthe ace.

A particularly striking example of a metalinguistic negation which absolutely requires its but rectification appears in Elizabeth Stone's explanation of why it is that, for Jessie-the protagonist of Marsha Norman's Pulitzer-winning play 'night, Mother-suicide counts as a positive act expressing not despair but autonomy:

(A2) Not she chooses to DIE, but she CHOOSES to die. (Ms., July 1983, 56) Note that, like 39a in the text, A2 represents a graphemic contradiction if the negation is taken truth-functionally.

Rectification of metalinguistic negation can be expressed in a variety of ways, as seen in the alternate forms of A3a-b:

(A3) a. It isn't hot, but scalding. b. It isn't hot-it's scalding. c. #It isn't hot, but it's scalding.

As in examples discussed in the text, hot is objected to on the grounds that the predication it yields, though true, is too weak. But the syntax of A3c forces an interpretation on which but functions as a true sentential connective (rather than a rectification), and negation functions only as an ordinary descriptive operator.

The reason A3c is pragmatically deviant (as signaled by the crosshatch) is that-given the fact that anything scalding is also (at least) hot-it is inconsistent to assert of anything that it is scalding yet not hot (cf. Cormack on 'paradoxical negation', discussed in fn. 25). Similarly, the metalinguistic interpretation of A4a (cf. ?2.3) disappears with the unreduced syntax of the but clause in A4b:

(A4) a. We don't have three children {b-w have four} but four. b. #We don't have three children, but we (do) have four.

When such sentential but conjunctions are acceptable (as descriptive negations), they tend to be interpreted as concessions, and assigned a characteristic intonation contour:

(A5) a. We don't have three children, but we do have two.

b. It isn't hot, but it is warm (#scalding).

c. Negation isn't ambiguous semantically, but it is pragmatically. The acceptability contrast in A5b, or that between A5a and A4b, intuitively hinges on just what

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can count as a concession. The appearance of supportive do in what must be taken as an emphatic environment, and the heavy stress on the auxiliary, are additional linguistic correlates of the concessive but clause.

My discussion of these two but constructions will lean heavily on the extremely insightful analysis of the cross-linguistic counterparts of these sentences given by Anscombre & Ducrot. They begin by pointing out that Spanish differentiates pero from sino, and German aber from sondern; but French contains just one surface connective mais. However, it enters into two distinguishable distributional patterns, corresponding to the PA (pero/aber) type and the SN (sino/sondern) type. Then, in the construction

(A6) NEG-p SN q the negative must be syntactically overt and unincorporated, and the entire sequence must come from one speaker:

(A7) Sp.: Eso no es consciente, sino totalmente automdtico. *es inconsciente,

Ger.: Das ist nicht bewusst, sondern ganz automatisch.

t *unbewusst, 'It is {not conscious / *unconscious} but (rather) totally automatic.'

Here q is presented as the motivation for denying p and, crucially, SN-but is compatible with polemic (i.e. metalinguistic) negation.

While the typical use of A6 directly follows a previous speaker's assertion of p, this is not a necessary condition on SN-but. Thus we can get the following, in both Spanish and German versions;

(A8) X: Pierre is nice. Y: He's not just nice, SN quite generous.

Here the object of Y's denial (he's just nice) hasn't actually been asserted, but is inferable via the 'loi d'exhaustivite'-Ducrot's version (1972), independently arrived at, of Grice's maxim of Quan- tity.

However, the construction

(A9) NEG-p PA q

necessarily involves descriptive use of negation (i.e. when a negative is present; unlike SN, PA is not restricted to negative contexts). Here p and q must have the same 'argumentative orientation' on a given scale, and p must be 'argumentatively superior' to q. (Anscombre & Ducrot's argumentative scales, also expounded in Ducrot 1973, are similar to-but not identical with-the pragmatic scales of Horn 1972, 1978b, and of Fauconnier 1975.) Thus we get A10 but not All:

(A10) Sp.: No es cierto, pero es probable. Ger.: Das ist nicht sicher, aber das ist wahrscheinlich.

'It's not certain, PA it is probable.' (All) Sp.: #No es probable, pero es cierto.

Ger.: #Das ist nicht wahrscheinlich, aber das ist sicher. 'It's not probable, PA it is certain.'

Though the SN vs. PA distinction is morphologically neutralized in French, Anscombre & Ducrot point out that certain diagnostics can be used to distinguish the two corresponding forms of mais. When mais = PA, we can add cependant, neanmoins, pourtant, en revanche, or par contre; when mais = SN, we can add au contraire or (in familiar style) meme que, or we can use paratactic syntax with no overt conjunction:

(A12) Ce n'est pas certain, maispA c'est pourtant probable. (= A10)

(A13) II n'est pa grand -il est tres grand. maissN tres grand.

'He isn't tall, SN very tall' When the SN-mais does occur overtly, however, its clause requires deletion (cf. 70 from Gross, and the English A4):

(A 14) #11 n'est pas grand, mais il est tres grand.

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As we noted for the parallel English examples A3c and A4b, A14 is pragmatically deviant on the concessive (PA) reading of mais which forces the negation to be taken descriptively.

Given that mais clauses with seulement (like but clauses with only or just) force the SN interpretation, they are incompatible with lexicalized (incorporated) negation (cf. A7):

(A15) a. II n'est pas intelligent, mais seulement bucheur. b. #I1 est inintelligent, mais seulement bucheur.

'He is ab. unintelligent j but just a grind.' [b. unintelligent'J

The failure of SN-but to co-occur with incorporated negation is reminiscent of the observation (cf. Horn 1972 and ?2.4 above) that metalinguistic negation does not incorporate prefixally in English; cf. the examples in 35b above.

Since non (pas) can be read only as metalinguistic negation (cf. Gross and ?4.2), it can occur only in environments which otherwise permit SN (rather than forcing PA) readings of mais:

(A16) a. II n'est pas francais mais il est beige. 'He isn't French, butpA he is Belgian.'

b. II est non pas francais mais (*il est) belge. 'He is not French butsN Belgian.'

(A17) a. C'est non seulement vraisemblable, mais certain. 'It's not just likely butsN certain.'

b. *C'est non pas certain mais reste possible. 'It's not certain butsN remains possible.'

The ungrammatical sentences are ruled out because the metalinguistic non pas negation forces the SN reading, which the context excludes.

Finally, Anscombre & Ducrot show that -p SN q constitutes a single speech act, while -p PA q represents two speech acts which may be associated with two separate interlocutors. The metalinguistic negation non (pas) requires the rectification of the offending item p by the affirmative statement q within the same speech act, and is thus incompatible with PA-mais.

In general, Anscombre & Ducrot's analysis carries over remarkably well to concessive (PA) and contrastive (SN) but clauses in English. Exx. Ala-b, A2, A3a-b, and A4a all illustrate SN-but in English, while A5 must be read as PA-but. Like the unacceptable Spanish, German, and French sentences, the crosshatched cases of A3c, A4b, and A5b are simultaneously disambiguated in both directions (by their syntax and/or context of utterance), and hence can be neither PA nor SN. English, of course, is on the French side of the isogloss, where the overt morphological distinction between PA and SN forms found in Spanish and German is neutralized.

The concessive PA examples are worth exploring a bit more closely. Ex. A5 exemplifies the usual pattern: two scalar terms are juxtaposed in the construction NEG-p PA q, with p taken to be a stronger element than q on a given scale. In the clear cases, such scales can be defined by unilateral entailment: four is stronger than three because any simple positive proposition with the scalar element four entails the corresponding proposition with three, but not vice versa. The scale containing scalding, hot, and warm which is implicitly evoked in A3 and A5b can be similarly constructed.

In each case, the use of the weaker scalar term conversationally implicates that (for all the speaker knows) no stronger term on the same scale could be substituted salva veritate (cf. ?2.3). Additional linguistic correlates can be found for the existence of these scales, as illustrated by these constructions:

(A18) not only X but Y not even X, {let alone / much less} Y X, (or) indeed Y at least X and possibly even Y X if not (downright) Y

(where Y exceeds X on some relevant scale) But the notion of scale which is relevant for these constructions is wider than entailment can accommodate. The entailment cases are special instances of what is more broadly a pragmatic

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relation, defined as much by knowledge and beliefs about the world shared by the speech partic- ipants as it is by the language itself (cf. Horn 1972, Ducrot 1972, 1973, Fauconnier 1975).

Consider these additional examples of well-formed and ill-formed concessive (PA) but conjunctions:

(A19) a. I don't have my master's degree, but I DO have my {bachelor's/#doctorate}. I DID spend a few years there.

b. I wasn't born in L.A., but #I was born in New York. (rather) in New York. [SN but]

c. Of course it isn't cotton-but it is cottony soft. [Cottonelle] rich/presentable. 1

(A20) He isn't handsome, but he IS a Catholic / a linguist. #ugly/?#mean. J

In the well-formed concessive examples in A19, it is straightforward to construct a scale on which the negated element outranks the item being affirmed. In A20, however, the concessive pattern expands to admit a case in which the two elements do not stand in an obvious scalar relation, but where they do occur as fellow members of an implicitly invoked set of attributes. The examples in A20 might be paraphrased as, e.g.,

(A20') He isn't handsome AND rich, but (at least) he is rich. (In the same way, (a") in fn. 26 may be read concessively as 'She isn't pretty and intelligent, but at least she's intelligent.')

The one case which strongly resists acceptability is that where the affirmation of the latter item, q, is judged incompatible with the negation of the former, p, either (as in A4b or A5b) because it is a STRONGER rather than WEAKER item on the same scale, or (as in A20) because it is just too mind-boggling to construct the set of which the two items in question function as fellow members (e.g. the set of attributes containing handsome and mean). Consider this unlikely, but actually attested, instance:

(A21) Tipping is not so common in Nepal. Tipping is not compulsory but it is obligatory. ('Nepal travel companion', by S. D. Bista & Y. R. Satyal, cited in the New Yorker, 7/19/82)

Even here, we infer that the writers (if they were not totally confused) were assuming a scale on which compulsory outranks obligatory-i.e. where anything compulsory is automatically obligatory, but not vice versa.

In fact, however, even the apparently deviant #-marked examples can be rendered acceptable when ingenuity permits construction of the relevant pragmatic scale. Suppose that you have an- nounced that you are looking for people with three children (to fill out a questionnaire, for example, or to offer aid and solace); then, if I assume that having four children qualifies me almost as well (or even better), I can nominate myself by uttering the suddenly redeemed A4b.

Abbott 1972, citing some unpublished observations of Charles Fillmore, discusses this set of examples:

(A22) a. John was born not in Boston, but in Philadelphia. b. #John was born in Philadelphia, but not in Boston. c. (#)John wasn't born in Boston, but he was born in Philadelphia.

While A22a is good on what we've been calling the SN reading, the syntax of A22b-c forces the PA interpretation: the former because its first clause lacks negation, and the latter because its second clause is unreduced and contains an overt conjunction. As both Fillmore and Abbott note, A22b suggests the (unsatisfiable) expectation that John could have been born both in Philadelphia and in Boston, while A22c seems to have 'an associated assumption that there is a scale connected with places to be born in, and that Boston represents a more extreme point on that scale than Philadelphia' (Abbott, 19). For me, one context which renders A22c acceptable by commissioning the construction of just such a scale is the following: a casting director for a school play in a small town in Iowa or Mississippi, needing a fifth-grader to portray JFK in a forthcoming production, is being convinced to settle for John.

If either the non-focused material he was born or the conjunction but itself is deleted from A22c,

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we obtain the SN reading which, as in A22a, is acceptable without any special context: (A22') John wasn't born in Boston, {but / he was born} in Philadelphia.

Crucially, auxiliary negation allows both the PA reading (as in A22c) and the SN reading (as in A22'), depending on the syntax of the second clause. However, post-auxiliary ('constituent') negation can only be taken metalinguistically (like non (pas) in French, which also immediately precedes its focus or target), and is thus incompatible with the concessive PA reading. Thus, while A22c is the PA version of A22', the latter's post-auxiliary-negated paraphrase A22a has no acceptable PA counterpart:

(A22") *John was born not in Boston, but he was born in Philadelphia. These English facts parallel the French examples from Anscombre & Ducrot, viz. A16-17 above.

As seen in the discussion of A4, the requisite pragmatic scale may force an inversion of the ordinary semantically-based (entailment-generated) scale involving the same elements. Thus too, the #-marked version of A19a becomes acceptable if the speaker feels that the interlocutor is looking, essentially, for someone with a graduate degree, rather than particularly a master's. Sim- ilarly, A23 in isolation seems implausible, since it alludes to a scale on which being a private outranks being a corporal.

(A23) #He isn't a private, but he is a corporal. Yet just such a scale CAN be constructed, if the context is fleshed out in the right way: the Colonel has ordered the Lieutenant to find a private to blame that last mission on. The Lieutenant reports back to the Colonel:

(A23') I've found a soldier we can volunteer for that mission, sir. He isn't a private, but he is a corporal. Will he do?

Note that in this same context, the scalar terms almost, barely, not even etc. reverse their normal distribution, helping to confirm this ad-hoc inversion of the standard scale:

(A23") He's almost a private. Inspection seems to indicate that similar unusual (if not outlandish) contexts can be constructed to redeem the unacceptable PA examples from Anscombre & Ducrot, e.g. A1 la-b above.

The English examples discussed in this Appendix are consistent with Anscombre & Ducrot's thesis that the negation (optionally) figuring in the concessive PA-but constructions is necessarily descriptive, while the negative required by the SN contexts may be either descriptive or (more frequently) metalinguistic. Thus the contrast between the SN and PA types of but constructions, in languages like French and English-as well as (if more subtly than) in languages like Spanish and German-constitutes another diagnostic for metalinguistic vs. descriptive uses of negation.28

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[Received 20 July 1983; revision received 24 January 1984; accepted 29 May 1984.]

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