UCL Discovery
UCL home » Library Services » Electronic resources » UCL Discovery

Negation 'presupposition' and metarepresentation: a response to Noel Burton-Roberts

Carston, R; (1999) Negation 'presupposition' and metarepresentation: a response to Noel Burton-Roberts. Journal of Linguistics , 35 (2) 365 - 389. Green open access

[thumbnail of download2.pdf]
Preview
PDF
download2.pdf

Download (731kB)

Abstract

Metalinguistic negation (MN) is interesting for at least the following two reasons: (a) it is one instance of the much broader, very widespread and various phenomenon of metarepresentational use in linguistic communication, whose semantic and pragmatic properties are currently being extensively explored by both linguists and philosophers of language; (b) it plays a central role in recent accounts of presupposition-denial cases, such as ‘The king of France is not bald; there is no king of France’. It is this latter employment that discussion of metalinguistic negation has focused on since Horn (1985)'s key article on the subject. While Burton-Roberts (1989a, 1989b) saw the MN account of presupposition-denials as providing strong support for his semantic theory of presupposition, I have offered a multi-layered pragmatic account of these cases, which also involves MN, but maintains the view that the phenomenon of presupposition is pragmatic (Carston 1994, 1996, 1998a).

Type: Article
Title: Negation 'presupposition' and metarepresentation: a response to Noel Burton-Roberts
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
Publisher version: http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstra...
Language: English
Additional information: © 1999 Cambridge University Press
Keywords: metalinguistic negation, pragmatic contradiction, presupposition denial, semantics/pragmatics distinction, slips of the tongue
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Linguistics
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/22976
Downloads since deposit
373Downloads
Download activity - last month
Download activity - last 12 months
Downloads by country - last 12 months

Archive Staff Only

View Item View Item