Publications
Publication details [#41936]
Miestamo, Matti. 2001. Negation. In Östman, Jan-Ola, Jef Verschueren, Jan Blommaert and Chris Bulcaen, eds. Handbook of Pragmatics. 1999 Installment. John Benjamins.
Publication type
Article in book
Publication language
English
Keywords
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Annotation
Within linguistics, negation has been approached from various points of view, and a large number of topics related to negation is discussed in the literature. The central aspects of the most important issues will be covered in this essay, which discusses the scope of negation, some issues pertaining to the markedness of negation, the way negation is expressed in the world’s languages, negative polarity, negation and scalarity, metalinguistic negation, negative transport, some diachronic issues, and finally the acquisition of negation. Two central publications in the field are: Jespersen (1971), which can be considered the classical work on negation in linguistics, and Horn (1989), covering a wide range of issues in the semantics and pragmatics of negation.