A Cognitive-Interactional Model of Direct and Indirect Negation

Résumé 0

Negation is interpreted in the paper in a broad sense of the term. It covers explicit sentential negation as well as the elements of negativity, implicit in some meanings and their presuppositions. Relevant is also discourse negatibility, dormant in speakers’ interactional contributions, in terms of the speakers’ ratification of an utterance and its potential refutability. Philosophical and psychological conditioning of negation is discussed and a mapping approach to negation is presented in terms of a cognitive-interactional model. The model assumes that a positive state of affairs has to be activated as an input space in negation and followed by a number of operations, which lead to the construction of spaces of a negative (counterfactual) type. For a positive state of affairs to be activated in negative contexts, the elements must be both embedded in a familiar frame and salient enough extralinguistically, i.e. foregrounded either by convention, context or individual subject’s experience. Indirect negation is identified on lexical, sentential and discourse levels, as exemplified in neg-raising and non-commitment cases, which involve suspended assessment and inclination, resolved towards positive or negative judgement in larger context. It invariably involves building complex multiple-space models, with the negated elements located in different parts of the structure, which affects the incrementation processes in current Discourse Domains