Negativity without negation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18148/sub/2023.v27.1072Abstract
This paper addresses the anaphoric polarity sensitivity of negativity-tags, challenging the idea that they are only licensed by sentential negation (e.g., Klima 1964; Kramer and Rawlins 2009; Farkas and Bruce 2010; Brasoveanu et al. 2013, 2014; Roelofsen and Farkas 2015), arguing instead that they are sensitive to counterfactual propositional content in discourse. This is supported by data showing that negativity-tags are licensed without overt negation and their acceptability is influenced by contextual factors. The emerging notion of discourse-polarity has theoretical implications: The discourse-effect of negation is tied to its anti-veridical semantics, and characterizing negative antecedents requires a discourse-level representation that integrates information from both semantic representations and pragmatic inferences.Downloads
Published
2023-11-30
How to Cite
Hofmann, L. (2023). Negativity without negation. Proceedings of Sinn Und Bedeutung, 27, 309–327. https://doi.org/10.18148/sub/2023.v27.1072
Issue
Section
Articles
License
Copyright (c) 2023 Lisa Hofmann
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/