Scopal Properties Research Articles

Some extensions of the echoic analysis of metalinguistic negation

Abstract This paper expands on Carston's (1996) analysis of metalinguistic negation as involving an echoic utterance in the scope of negation. In accordance with the thesis that the negation operator is uniformly truth-functional in both its descriptive and metalinguistic uses, metalinguistic negation shares scopal properties with descriptive negation. Echoic analysis needs to be elaborated by incorporating the notion ‘focus of echo’. The analysis thus elaborated uncovers aspects of metalinguistic negation that have been overlooked with respect to two characteristics: the prohibition against negative polarity items and the inability of metalinguistic negation to incorporate morphologically.

Fokuspartikeln in Lernervarietäten. Ein Analyserahmen und einige Beispiele

Focus particles are words such as only, even, also and similar ones. In many ways, they behave like the negation in that their particular meaning contribution may afffect the entire sentence in which they occur or only a selected part of it. They belong, again like the negation, to the earliest linguistic devices in first as well as in second language acquisition, but there is hardly any systematical investigation of how they are used in learner language; even in the case of negation, which is relatively well explored, the particular scopal properties are often ignored. The present paper develops develops a general framework to their analysis, based on earlier theoretical work by Jacobs, Konig and other; this framework is then applied to the learner of a Polish learner of German.