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Irregular Negatives, Implicatures, and Idioms

  • Book
  • © 2016

Overview

Authors:
  1. Wayne A. Davis

    1. Georgetown University, Washington, USA

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  • The first accurate description of the essential features of irregular negations which also identifies new members of the class
  • Offers a new, idiomatic theoretical foundation for ‘metalinguistic’ irregular negations
  • Deploys Davis’s ‘expression theory’ of meaning (2003, 2005) to account for a range of linguistic phenomena

Part of the book series: Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology (PEPRPHPS, volume 6)

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Table of contents (7 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xviii
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Irregular Negatives

    • Wayne A. Davis
    Pages 1-50

  3. Implicature

    • Wayne A. Davis
    Pages 51-84

  4. Irregular Negative Conventions

    • Wayne A. Davis
    Pages 85-138

  5. Implicature Theories

    • Wayne A. Davis
    Pages 139-176

  6. Pragmatic Explicature Theories

    • Wayne A. Davis
    Pages 177-208

  7. Free-Form Idiom Theory

    • Wayne A. Davis
    Pages 209-261

  8. Other Free-Form Idioms

    • Wayne A. Davis
    Pages 263-317
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Keywords

About this book

The author integrates, expands, and deepens his previous publications about irregular (or “metalinguistic”) negations.  A total of ten distinct negatives—several previously unclassified—are analyzed.  The logically irregular negations deny different implicatures of their root.  All are partially non-compositional but completely conventional.


The author argues that two of the irregular negative meanings are implicatures.  The others are semantically rather than pragmatically ambiguous.  Since their ambiguity is neither lexical nor structural, direct irregular negatives satisfy the standard definition of idioms as syntactically complex expressions whose meaning is non-compositional.  Unlike stereotypical idioms, idiomatic negatives lack fixed syntactic forms and are highly compositional.  The final chapter analyzes other “free form” idioms, including irregular interrogatives and comparatives, self-restricted verb phrases, numerical verb phrases, and transparent propositional attitude and speech act reports.



Authors and Affiliations

  • Georgetown University, Washington, USA

    Wayne A. Davis

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Irregular Negatives, Implicatures, and Idioms

  • Authors: Wayne A. Davis

  • Series Title: Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7546-5

  • Publisher: Springer Dordrecht

  • eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)

  • Copyright Information: Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-94-017-7544-1Published: 26 April 2016

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-94-024-1376-2Published: 22 April 2018

  • eBook ISBN: 978-94-017-7546-5Published: 15 April 2016

  • Series ISSN: 2214-3807

  • Series E-ISSN: 2214-3815

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: XVIII, 317

  • Number of Illustrations: 7 b/w illustrations

  • Topics: Semantics, Philosophy of Language

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