Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
  1. Home
  2. Browse subjects
  3. Language and Linguistics
  4. Content listing

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

101325 results in Language and Linguistics

Page 677 of 5067

  • Exploring a ‘Pragmatic Ambiguity’ of Negation

  • Alyson Pitts
  • Journal:
    Language / Volume 87 / Issue 2 / June 2011
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    19 February 2026, pp. 346-368

  • This article explores a ‘pragmatic ambiguity’ of negation in English, first discussed by Horn (1985, 1989:Ch.6) in his appeal to an intuitive division between ordinary, ‘descriptive’ negation and marked, ‘metalinguistic’ uses of negation in everyday language. The main agenda is to better understand what such a pragmatic ambiguity of negation really amounts to: are there sufficient grounds to posit TWO types of negation, and what prevents Horn's PRAGMATIC ambiguity from being SEMANTIC in its nature?

    In this article, I review the key features promoted by Horn as characteristic of the purported duality in negation—particularly those posited for marked, metalinguistic uses of negation, such as resistance to prefixal incorporation, failure to trigger negative polarity items, and employment of the paradigmatic not X but Y construction. I then consider and evaluate subsequent attempts to posit a finer-grained analysis of metalinguistic negation, as endorsed by Foolen (1991) and Geurts (1998). The article concludes by upholding the so-called pragmatic ambiguity, but advises due caution with regard to Horn's diagnostics when appealing to this intuitive distinction of negation within use.

  • Raising and Transparency

  • Ronald W. Langacker
  • Journal:
    Language / Volume 71 / Issue 1 / March 1995
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    19 February 2026, pp. 1-62

  • The phenomena that classic transformational syntax handled by means of ‘raising’ rules pose an interesting challenge to theories that do not posit movement or derivation from underlying structures. An account of these phenomena is formulated in the context of cognitive grammar. Raising is analyzed as a special case of the metonymy that virtually all relational expressions exhibit in regard to their choice of overtly coded arguments. The transparency of these constructions—the fact that the main clause imposes no restrictions on the ‘raised’ NP—is explained with reference to the semantics of the governing predicates.

Page 677 of 5067