The author integrates, expands, and deepens his previous publications about irregular (or metalinguistic) negations. A total of ten distinct negativesseveral previously unclassifiedare 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.

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

Inhalt

Preface.- Chapter 1. Irregular Negatives.- Chapter 2. Implicature.- Chapter 3. Irregular Negative Conventions.- Chapter 4. Implicature Theories.- Chapter 5. Pragmatic Explicature Theories.- Chapter 6. Free-Form Idiom Theory.- Chapter 7. Other Free-Form Idioms.