Nature and Categorization of Metalinguistic Negation

Abstract

Metalinguistic negation, as opposed to descriptive negation, has captured great attention from scholars in philosophy, semantics and pragmatics, etc. throughout the world after its initiation. Various aspects of it have been brought into heated discussions, including its nature, categorization, constraints, scope and focus of negation and pragmatic functions, and so on. However, as the basis of investigation, what is the nature of metalinguistic negation and how it should be categorized are still controversial and current solutions to these two questions seem to be biased. This paper attempts to provide an impartial and more plausible explanation for its nature from the perspective of “use” and “mention” and categorize it according to prototype theory. Based on the distinction between “use” and “mention” and prototype theory, it is proposed that metalinguistic negation is the negation of what is mentioned rather than used in a sentence, and that there is an interface between descriptive negation and metalinguistic negation; in other words, there is no clear-cut borderline between descriptive negation and metalinguistic negation and they are two poles of the same continuum.