Descriptive/metalinguistic dichotomy?: Toward a new taxonomy of negation

•In Japanese, internal negation is marked by nai and external negation is marked by node wa nai and wake de wa nai.•The crucial dichotomic property is not ‘truth-functionality’ but ‘attribution’ of the lower-order representations.•It results in the functional distinction between Description and Objection.•Horn's DN/MN dichotomy should be replaced with the distinction between Description and Objection.•An abstract, logical view of negation should be replaced with a functional, cognitive-pragmatic view.

This paper proposes, based on Japanese data, that Horn's (1985) descriptive/metalinguistic dichotomy of negation should be replaced with a distinction between OBJECTION and DESCRIPTION, and that the taxonomy with an abstract, logical view of negation should be replaced by a functional, cognitive-pragmatic (relevance-theoretic) view. Horn's descriptive negation (DN) represents a truth-functional operator, taking a proposition p into a proposition not-p, and “metalinguistic” negation (MN) represents a non-truth-functional operator, objecting to a previous utterance. While it is hard for English to distinguish DN from MN based only on their forms, Japanese external negation is marked by a number of forms, each of which is sensitive to different properties. Based on a close examination of three Japanese negatives, nai (≒ not), node wa nai (≒ it is not that…) and wake de wa nai (≒ it does not follow/mean that…), this paper extracts three properties that contribute to the taxonomy of negation (i.e. objection as a function, attribution in Wilson's (2000) sense, and the conceptuality of the negation target), and concludes that the ‘attribution’ of the lower representation (and its resulting function ‘objection’), but not truth-functionality, is a crucial property for the dichotomy of (at least Japanese) sentence negation.