Part I: Negation in discourse
Discourse negation via the ne … –sI structures in Turkish
Hasan Mesut Meral Yıldız Teknik University, Department of Turkish Language Education, Faculty of Education, İstanbul, Turkey
Note: I am deeply indebted to Dr. Sabahat Tura for encouraging me to study linguistics and our discussions on the structure of Turkish. Her approach to Turkish linguistics inspired me a lot during my academic career and will continue to do so in the future.
I thank the editors and the reviewers of this volume for their invaluable remarks, criticism and suggestions which improved this work a lot. Usual disclaimers apply.
Abstract
The aim of this work is to investigate the issue of discourse negation observed in ne … –sI structures in Turkish casual conversations. We show that discourse negation observed in the structures under discussion involves strong objection to the original statement and a subsequent rectification of it. The strength of the utterance provided by the special linguistic forms and intonation in these structures is the main tool which differentiates them from other regular instances of negation in Turkish. We provide three sets of discussions for the issue: (i) argumentative discourse mode, (ii) tri-partite discourse structure, and (iii) descriptive vs. metalinguistic negation.
With respect to (i), the paper claims that the structures under discussion involve an argumentative discourse mode where Speaker B asserts a strong objection to, denial and refusal of the statement made by Speaker A as the first part of his/her answer. The consequent strong rectification in the second part of the answer by Speaker B is another support for the argumentative mode. For (ii), we show that a tri-partite discourse structure is observed where the first part involves an expectation statement by Speaker A, the second part includes Speaker B’s strong objection to this expectation, and the third part includes Speaker B’s strong rectification of the denied information. With respect to (iii), the paper shows that the structures under investigation have a dual nature with respect to descriptive vs. metalinguistic negation. We present some cases of descriptive negation with a strong objection as opposed to others that may include metalinguistic negation with weak or “fake” denials.
1 Introduction
Negation is traditionally defined as a logical operator which reverses the truth of a proposition. This semantics-oriented definition of negation has been the focus of many works in the literature (Klima 1964; Payne 1985; Frawley 1992 among others) and various types of negation within a sentence have been investigated (sentential vs. verbal negation as involving an external negation operator vs. internal one respectively). Accordingly, negative elements may cover (i) the whole proposition in a sentence having the widest scope in the logical structure: propositional negation (Payne 19...
