The linguistic meaning of negative sentences and restrictions on their utterance

• Kataoka Kiyoko

  Faculty of Foreign Languages, Kanagawa University

Bibliographic Information

Other Title

• 否定文の言語的意味と発話における制約

Abstract

As is generally agreed, the linguistic meaning of a sentence consists of its logical meaning, which reflects the syntactic relations of its constituents, and presupposed propositions, if any, which are required to be true although they may not be derived from the logical representations (i.e., 'zuihan-meidai' or required propositions). We observe that, for an utterance of a negative sentence to be felicitous, the speaker must make beforehand a relevant presumption (i.e., 'zuihan-sootee' or required presumption), which is not reflected syntactically or semantically, but is a pragmatic requirement; without the required presumption, the utterance could not be appropriate even though the sentence itself is grammatical. The utterance of a negative sentence, therefore, involves its logical meaning, the required propositions as semantic meaning, and the required presumption as a pragmatic restriction. This paper examines negative sentences which contain negation-sensitive elements to explore how a required proposition and a required presumption for a negative sentence interact to give rise to a relevant interpretation in the discourse where it is uttered.

Journal

• 九州大学言語学論集

  九州大学言語学論集 35 348-363, 2015

  Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Humanities, Kyushu University

Keywords

• negative sentence
• zuihan-meidai
• required proposition
• zuihan-sootee
• required presumption

Details

• CRID: 1390572174792440320
• NII Article ID: 120005624064
• NII Book ID: AA11886316
• DOI: 10.15017/1518729
• HANDLE: 2324/1518729
• Text Lang: ja
• Data Source:
  • JaLC
  • IRDB
  • CiNii Articles
  • KAKEN
• Abstract License Flag: Allowed