• Language and Information
• /
• v.19 no.2
• /
• pp.127-153
• /
• 2015

Negative expressions have their semantic function of classical negation as a pure reverser of truth-values. They also have various kin and foes of their pragmatic functions such as association of bad feelings (Russell 1948), emphasis/attenuation by negative polarity items, sarcasm, and metalinguistic negation (MN). This paper explores how MN and descriptive negation (DN) differ and whether the difference creates pragmatic ambiguity (Horn 1987) or reflects merely contextual variations of one logical negation (Carston 1996). To test the debate, this paper treats certain degree modifiers licensed exclusively by MN as in Mia-ka POTHONG/Yekan yeppu-n key an-i-a [external neg] (vs. modifier NPIs like cenhye 'at all', licensed only by DN) and contrasts them with bad utterances of the MN modifiers in [short form neg] sentences (not for MN) such as Mia-ka POTHONG an yeppu-e. The ERP results of the well-formed vs. ill-formed conditions evoked the N400 at Cz in written stimuli and the N400 near the center on both hemispheres in spoken stimuli. The results suggest that the anomalies are meaning-related and tend to support the pragmatic ambiguity.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Language and Information Conference
• /
• 2002.02a
• /
• pp.370-382
• /
• 2002

This paper puts forward an analysis of scope interactions between Japanese adverbial quantifiers like mainichi 'everyday'and tokidoki 'sometimes'and a negative morpheme nai 'not'on the basis of f(ocus)-structures. In this analysis, three f-structures are assigned to a sentence with an adverbial quantifier and a negative morpheme. One of them represents a negation-wide reading, and the other two represent quantifier-wide readings. Some f-structures, however, are unacceptable due to semantic or pragmatic factors. Different scope behaviors of the two quantifiers mentioned above can then be ascribed to acceptability of f-structures.

• Language and Information
• /
• v.4 no.2
• /
• pp.107-124
• /
• 2000

This paper reports the syntactic distribution of amu-N-to/-ilato/-ina phrase, which are representative polarity sensitive items. (PSIs) in Korean, and ac- counts for their semantic characteristics in therms of "arbitrary choice quantification" and "concession" In the first section, we extensively illustrate the distributional behaviour of the PSIs in various costructions and roughly generalize the distribu- tion in terms of "(anti/non-) verdicality" Section 2 claims amu denotes an arbi- trary choice quantifier and the particles -to/-ilato/-ina as "concessive" markers, so the compounds denote a special element in a pragmatic scale determined by con- text/situation, Section 3. based on the pragmatics of scalar implicature, accounts for the apparent ambiguity of PSIs between "universal"and "existential"readings and further characterizes the difference among the concessive markers -to/-ilato/-ina in terms of "quantity/ quality scale."rkers -to/-ilato/-ina in terms of "quantity/ quality scale."