External and Verb Phrase Negations in Actual Dialogues  

Oleh:

Wiche, Rob T. P.

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Journal of Semantics (Sebagian Full Text) vol. 8 no. 1-2 (Dec. 1991), page 107-125.
Topik: Verb Phrase Negations; Actual Dialogues; Event Logic.
Fulltext: vol 8, no 1, p 107-125.pdf (700.68KB)

Isi artikel

Negations play an important role in actual dialogues. If one participant of a dialogue is negating an utterance of the other participant (or is uttering a sentence that entails a negation of an utterance of the other participant), there occurs a verbal conflict between the participants. 1 This conflict is resolved as soon as a participant is forced (only by verbal means, of course) to give up a sentence so that there is no longer a conflict In recent theories about.negation a distinction is rather often made between two different kinds of negation.2 Gabbay & Moravcsik (1978) and Hoepelman (1979) make a distinction between (sentence) negation and denial. Gabbay and Moravcsik motivate their distinction as follows: 'That the negation of a true proposition takes us to a false one, is one of the early lessons in elementary logic. Sentence negation is important for logic, for it gives us general ways of characterizing contradictoriness, and thus helps us formulating such basic laws as the law of non contradiction. In everyday discourse however, negative sentences are used to formulate denials of various sorts. In fact, even the notion of a denial is too narrow; denial, objection, criticism, etc. are all everyday activities the point of which is to say: "No, it is not like this; rather, it is like that"'3 Jacobs (1982) distinguishes between 'kontrastierende Negation' and 'nicht kontrastierende Negation', and Horn (1985, 1989) between Truth functional (descriptive, logical) negation and Metalinguistic (non-descriptive, non-logical) negation. Barth & Wiche (1986) distinguish between three kinds of negation: Exclusion negation, Choice negation and Discrepancy negation. I will try to combine all these approaches. In the style of Jacobs I will make a distinction between Contrasting Negation (Cneg) and Non-Contrasting Negation (NCneg). Cneg has to be divided in Choice negation and Metalinguistic negation. NCneg has to be divided in Exclusion negation and Verb Phrase negation. Verb Phrase negation corresponds roughly with the Discrepancy negation from Barth & Wiche. NCneg is characterized formally by the negation operator '-' from classical, two-valued logic, Cneg by the metalinguistic operator '-KORR'. 'KORR' is Jacobs's correctness operator. Event logic will be used as a valuable instrument for characterizing formally the difference between the different types of negation that are discussed in this paper.

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