Negation in Exclamatives

Abstract

AbstractThe goal of this article is to provide a principled account of the semantic contribution of the so‐called “expletive” negation, as it occurs in negative exclamatives. This type of negation differs from canonical negation in that it does not contribute its canonical meaning as a propositional operator, occurs higher in the syntactic structure of the clause, does not license negative polarity items, and expresses a bias towards the opposite polarity. In this article, we show that these properties are also found in negative rhetorical questions. We propose that exclamatives, as well as rhetorical questions, denote sets of propositions structured into Boolean algebras, with the negation imposing an order of informativity upon such structures.