The Expression of Negation

Human thought and action is fundamentally shaped by a small set of cognitive categories, such as time, space, causality, or possession. It is not surprising, therefore, that all natural languages have developed many devices to express these categories. Temporality, for example, is reflected in the lexical meaning of verbs, in grammatical marking of tense and aspect, in time adverbials, in special particles, and in the application of discourse principles. Many of these devices have been the subject of intensive research across languages; but as a rule, this research focuses on particular aspects, it does not look at the expression of such a category as a whole. Precisely this is the aim of the present series. The short volumes will bring together what is known about the expression of a particular category in human language.

The series THE EXPRESSION OF COGNITIVE CATEGORIES is edited by WOLFGANG KLEIN and STEPHEN LEVINSON, Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen (The Netherlands).

Negation is a core feature of human language, a precondition for contradiction, denial, irony, and lies. This book surveys the form and function of negative sentence, providing state-of-the-art studies and a comprehensive bibliography on the acquisition, processing, and historical development of negation and its interaction with other operators. the chapters explore polarity, "illogical" negation, and the grammatical semantic, and pragmatic factors in cross-linguistic expression of negation.

Laurence R. Horn is professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at Yale University. His work focuses on semantics, pragmatics, and the properties of natural language negation.