Irregular negations: Pragmatic explicature theories

Abstract

I will examine negations that are “irregular” in that they are not used in accordance with standard logical rules. These include scalar-, metalinguistic-, specifying-, and evaluative-implicature denials; presupposition-canceling denials; and contrary affirmations. The principal questions are how their irregular interpretations are related to their regular interpretation, and whether their ambiguity is semantic or pragmatic. I argue here that pragmatic “explicature” (Carston) or “impliciture” (Bach) theories have few advantages over implicature theories (Grice, Horn, Burton-Roberts), and that clear examples of pragmatic explicatures involve indexicality or syntactic ellipsis, which are not involved in irregular negations. I argue against claims that any interpretation can be “pragmatically derived” using either Gricean or Relevance theory. With one class of exceptions, I argue for a semantic ambiguity thesis maintaining that irregular interpretations are idioms that plausibly evolved from generalized conversational implicatures. The exceptions are evaluative-implicature denials, which are still live implicatures.