Journal of Linguistics Research

Abstract

The metalinguistic use of 'not' has been brought to prominence by the work of Laurence Horn, who characterizes it as a marked, non-truth- functional use of negation, not reducible to the standard truth-functional operator. Discussion of the phenomenon so far has focused on those cases which tend to temporarily garden-path the hearer and achieve interesting rhetorical effects in the process. The notorious 'presupposition'- cancelling negation cases have been included here. I argue that this emphasis has diverted attention from the essential property of these examples which is thai (at least some of) the material falling within the scope of the negation is echoically used, in the sense of Sperber and Wilson (1986). Once this is recognized the pictvire opens up considerably and it becomes evident that none of the standardly cited properties, including garden-pathing, is essential.