Anything negatives can do affirmatives can do just as well, except for some metaphors [An article from: Journal of Pragmatics]

This digital document is a journal article from Journal of Pragmatics, published by Elsevier in 2006. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
In this study I look into some of the functions people believe are specific to negation vis-a-vis affirmation in order to question the asymmetry between the two, which is the received view prevalent among many formal linguists, pragmatists, and psycholinguists (see, Horn 1989; Clark and Clark, 1977). On the assumption that ''[m]uch of the speculative, theoretical, and empirical work on negation over the last twenty-three centuries has focused on the relatively marked or complex nature of the negative statement vis-a-vis its affirmative counterpart'' (Horn, 1989:xiii), I examine here the extent to which negation is indeed pragmatically different from affirmation. Based on findings from both naturally occurring and laboratory data, I argue against an asymmetrical view of negation and affirmation (for a different view, see Horn, 1989:201). The pragmatic and functional similarity found here between negation and affirmation can be explained only by higher level processing mechanisms that are governed by pragmatic sensitivity (Giora, 1985; Sperber and Wilson, 1986/1995).