Negation & Cancellation

Tuesday 10-12, IG 4.301

In this seminar, we want to look at negation and cancellation by investigating linguistic cancellation phenomena and comparing them to ordinary negation. Cancellation is a negation-like phenomenon, however not proposition-based, but discourse-related. It can be seen as a type of negation at the discourse level. The phenomena and analyses we want to look at are: -form denials, sometimes also referred to as metalinguistic negation, -ways to express presupposition and implicature refusals, -common ground management particles that express disapproval with material in the common ground such as German ‚doch‘ or ‚aber‘ or Bavarian ‚fei‘, -exceptive constructions as in „/Everyone was invited, except Peter/“, which seem to subtract information from just made assertions -visual means to express negation and cancellation such as (non)manual co-speech gestures By taking a closer look at these data, I hope we can clarify the relationship of negation to cancellation and its relation to well-known discourse moves such as denial, refusal, and correction, as well as make a step towards the development of a concise theory of the CG dynamics that can handle the cases of cancellation that we observe in human discourse.