What does high negation do? Nothing, negation, or denegation?

Abstract

This study discusses the semantics of the so-called high negation, which is probably a type of expletive negation in English realized in the guise of n’t in subject–auxiliary inversion contexts. We compare and scrutinize two types of phenomena that carry this item—high negation questions and negative inversion exclamatives—to elucidate its semantic contributions. High negation is revealed to function as a denegation (Searle, 1969; Cohen and Krifka, 2014), that is, the speaker’s refusal of someone’s assertion. In addition, the one to be refused is determined in correlation with the speech act ranging over high negation, suggesting that the negations involved in both phenomena are a unique lexical entry.