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Article published In:
Pragmatics
Vol. 28:4 (2018) ► pp.599–616

Negative existentials

A problem still unsolved

| MTA-DE-SZTE Research Group for Theoretical Linguistics

Negative existentials containing empty NPs are understood colloquially as representing how things stand in the world. Moreover, utterances of such sentences seem to express propositions or thoughts that are informative and true. Standard static semantic theories cannot provide a straightforward account of these intuitive phenomena. In such frameworks, sentences with empty NPs are considered as being unable to express truth-evaluable contents. This paper investigates two alternative theories of negative existentials. A common feature of these theories is that they adopt a dynamic approach to meaning. I will argue that neither of these alternatives provides a reassuring solution to the apparent truth-conditional problem generated by the utterances of negative existentials.

Keywords: negative existentials, dynamic semantics, pragmatics, presupposition, modulation, linguistic data
Article outline
  • 1.Representing nothing: The contradictory features of negative existentials
  • 2.The dynamic semantic approach to negative existentials
  • 3.An alternative proposal: Static semantics with dynamic pragmatics
  • 4.Is there a way out?
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 23 October 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.17026.vec
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