Abstract
Contrary meaning is commonly analyzed as a pragmatic strengthening of contradictory sentence negation. This paper derives the contrary meaning found in no-DPs in predicate position (e.g. "John is no fool") through the analysis of no as negation that operates on the scale contributed by the predicate nominal expression.
Highlights
The sentences It is raining and It is not raining stand in contradictory opposition—in any context of use, if one of them is true the other is false, and that exhausts the possibilities
Contrary opposition is analyzed as the pragmatic strengthening of a contradictory sentential negation through logical inferences, notably the Disjunctive Syllogism, which I review to below
In what follows I make the case for a different account of contrary meaning in noDP predicates, which appeals to the interaction of negation with nominal scale structure, leaving open the possibility that the inferential approach explains other phenomena such as neg-raising and the interpretation of predicative adjectives
Summary
The sentences It is raining and It is not raining stand in contradictory opposition—in any context of use, if one of them is true the other is false, and that exhausts the possibilities. For example, a copular sentence with an adjectival predicate such as “John isn’t nice,” is conventionally used to mean that John is mean on this theory because in conversation we tend to extend the schema for disjunctive reasoning holding between contradictory terms to contrary opposites, opposites which function as if there were an excluded middle.
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