Metapragmatic negation as a rapport-oriented mitigating device

Negation has been found to be sentential in a standard way and metapragmatic in a nonstandard way. This study is about the latter, which cannot be treated as negation per se, although there is a negation marker bushi 'not', which pragmatically implies “it is not S that V (NP), but (because) …” as a conventionalized speaker meaning. On the meta level, the speaker is making an explicit statement of “I'm not performing the speech act of V” or “it's not I/we/he who V (you/him)”. However, it cannot be treated as standard negation in terms of its performative force. The initiated speech act of this construction expresses the speaker's intent of doing V or V-ing, such as “blaming”, “criticizing”, “abusing” or “threatening”. What follows or precedes the construction is quite offensive or face-threatening for the hearer in context, so interpersonal purposes are implied. Thus, I call this a metapragmatic construction, which is a non-denial of speaker intention, and I consider it a rapport-oriented mitigating device in terms of its interpersonal purposes because it helps to manage interpersonal relationships in interaction. It is a literal violation of the Gricean Maxim of Quality because it demonstrates at an explicit level that 'saying is doing its opposite'. However, the flouting or violation does not create implicatures, in the Gricean sense (Grice, 1975), that have any important communicative functions. To some degree, then, this challenges the 'saying-is-doing' claim made by Austin (1975).