2.1 Semantic properties of DN

Descriptive negation (DN) corresponds to ordinary – that is, truth-conditional – negation. As such, it is not enough to refer to the logical meaning of negation, simply because logical negation is propositional (it is not the case that P), whereas linguistic negation is syntactically either the negation of a sentence (13) or the negation of a constituent (14) (Klima 1964). For Klima, sentence negation can be tested by the addition of neither or not even, whereas constituent negation does not license not even, as (13) and (14) show:

Even if the semantics of (15) is given by (16), and corresponds syntactically to a sentence negation, its complete interpretation must specify the semantic focus of negation:

If the interpretation of the proposition ‘Abi is married’ in (15) is given as false by the negation operator, the question is why this proposition is false. Two possible answers can be given here. First, if the question under discussion (QUD, Roberts 2004) is (17):

the propositional function ‘x is married’ is false of Abi if Abi does not belong to the extension of married. However, in that case, a better answer would simply be Not Abi rather than Abi is not married. Second, if Abi is the topic of the discourse, what is expected is that Abi is defined by a set of properties, in which ‘being married’ is excluded. So, the complete interpretation of a negative sentence can be expected to contain a corrective clause, stating which property (or predicate) is not only true of Abi, but also relevant in the context of the conversation. For instance, a possible corrective clause might be (18):

So, the semantic meaning of (18) is inferred from NEG and COR, where NEG stands for the negative clause and COR for the corrective clause. In other words, I assume here that the complete interpretation of a negative clause must contain an alternative to the positive counterpart of the negative clause (POS), either explicitly or implicitly. Hence, if COR is overt, COR belongs to the set of alternatives to POS; if COR is covert, a complete interpretation of NEG must license a set of alternatives to POS, as represented in (19):

As an initial conclusion, it can be assumed that the investigation of negative utterances implies a relation between three propositions: NEG, COR and POS. The next sections will show that these relations are key to understanding the difference between descriptive and metalinguistic negation.

Turning to the relationship between POS and COR, three properties can be usefully implemented, following Moeschler’s (2013a) proposal: COR entailments, scope of negation, and discourse connectives linking NEG and COR.

2.2 Entailment

The entailment relation between NEG and COR is that COR entails NEG, as (20) shows:

This entailment property is semantic. With scalar predicates, the strong predicate entails the weak one, whereas with antonyms, the affirmation of one predicate entails the negation of the other, the converse only being the case for complementary antonyms. As I will discuss in section 3, this entailment property exhibits a strong contrast between upward metalinguistic negation and downward descriptive negation.

2.3 Scope of negation

When it comes to the scope of negation, the inferential property again contrasts upward MN with DN, as in (22) and (23):

What is interesting here is that a DN use gives rise to a non-ambiguous implication. In other words, we are invited to infer from (22) that Abi is less than beautiful, which is made explicit in (24):

Therefore, the issue is how COR entailments match the scope of negation (a proposition). I assume that negation semantically scopes over a proposition – here, ‘Abi is beautiful’ – rather than over an utterance or over a sentence.³ Thus, this minimal meaning is a consequence of the asymmetry between the affirmation and the negation of antonyms: if ‘x is beautiful’ entails ‘x is not ugly’, then it is possible that ‘x is not beautiful’ simply describes a degree of beauty less than that which would qualify as beautiful, without having a precise target. For instance, if it is not the case that Abi is beautiful has a descriptive meaning, then the set of alternatives, made explicit in COR, must entail NEG, that is, ‘Abi is not beautiful’, as shown in (25):

On the other hand, if (22) is true, the upward alternative to beautiful is not expected, because, as in (23), COR entails POS, and not NEG.

I hypothesize that the convergence between COR entailments and the scope of negation (i.e. a proposition) makes COR covert. This analysis will only be complete when metalinguistic negation will be taken into account, because, in this case, the presence of COR ensures the expected wide scope interpretation – that is, negation scoping on a scalar implicature. However, this does not mean that DN is obtained by default (see Blochowiak & Grisot 2018 for experimental confirmation). My argument is that negation is semantically unambiguous, and pragmatically specified as DN or MN.

2.4 Connectives

The third criterion is the connective used when NEG is followed by COR. COR introduces a correction of POS, which is explicit in dialogue, but implicit in a response to an initial move (26A). (26) is a dialogical illustration, where the prototypical connective in French is au contraire ‘on the contrary’, whereas in (27) au contraire follows NEG (27a), and not POS (27b):

On the other hand, mais ‘but’, which I will return to discuss in section 5, is only possible in monologic utterances – see the contrast between (28) and (29):

Essentially, in DN, COR entails NEG, the scope of negation is a proposition, and the prototypical connectives relating NEG and COR are au contraire and mais in French – three properties which, as we will see, are different from those that define MN.

3.1 Pragmatic properties of MN

MN was first discussed in examples of metarepresentation, contrasting other cases of direct discourse, indirect discourse, free indirect style, hearsay adverbs, echoic utterances with dissociating attitudes, pragmatic markers and tag-questions, among others (Wilson 2012). Manifestly, MN examples are those in which embedded representations are public representations, which is to say utterances – see examples (8) to (10), repeated here for convenience:

If a metarepresentation is a representation of a representation – that is, a higher-order representation R1 embedding a lower-level representation R2, as in (30) – then MN must adhere to this format. For instance, (10) receives the representation in (31):

In other words, if metalinguistic uses of negation are metarepresentations, in the sense put forward by Wilson, then negation belongs to a higher-order representation, and the utterance⁵ under the scope of negation is a lower-order representation. If we follow Horn’s definition of metalinguistic negation (Horn 1985), [_R1 not [_R2 U]] corresponds to I object that U. As such, (30) is attributed the format in (32), and (10) the description in (33):

In this case, the COR clause (I managed to trap two mongooses) corresponds to what the speaker takes responsibility for saying.

However, the Hornian and Relevance-based interpretations of MN are not identical: in the Relevance-based interpretation of MN as metarepresentation, negation is semantically – as well as pragmatically – unambiguous. What makes the difference between DN and MN is a question of complexity: DN is a simple and single representation, where negation scopes over a sentence, whereas MN scopes over another representation, which is to say an utterance.

The question of the nature of the embedded representation (utterance, thought, sentence or proposition) is a question of context, as will be seen later.⁶ From a formal point of view, metalinguistic negation can scope over a mental representation like a thought, when the context of use refers to an attributed thought – as, for instance, in the case of irony – or an abstract proposition, especially when some entailment relations hold. Below, I will mainly discuss cases where the embedded representation is a sentence whose semantic format is propositional. I will capitalize on formal and logical properties of propositions to differentiate straightforwardly between DN and MN.

Horn (1989: 384) has given several examples of MN which seem to have propositions or sentences as embedded representations. Here are the most classic examples:

Consider the classic example showcasing the Hornian scale <all, some>, where some implicates ‘not all’ and all entails ‘some’. First, the embedding format can be represented with propositions, because what is at stake here are logical properties, which are not shared in the previous examples of MN. This can be seen in example (38):

If R2 is a proposition, it must be explained why, while scoping over a positive particular, negation does not trigger the classical pragmatic interpretation – that is, the negative particular implicature. In other words, why does (38) not give rise to the classical DN interpretation, made explicit in (40)?

If the DN interpretation is not licensed in (38), other semantic scales should give the same type of result. However, this does not happen: the <certain, possible> scale gives rise to a contradiction, as does the <and, or> scale:

Why does this happen, though? Some and some not are compatible (they are subcontraries), but possible P and not possible P are not logically connected in a similar fashion:⁸ what is logically connected is the pair possible P and possible not P. As far as the <and, or> scale is concerned, not (P or Q) and (P or Q) are contradictory.

So, how is it possible that some not and all do not give rise to a contradiction? From a logical perspective, a positive universal (all) and a negative particular (not all, some not) are contradictory. So, what should be expected is that some not and all are incompatible (they are contradictories), as elucidated by the logical square in Figure 1:

Figure 1

The logical square.

So why can some not and all be compatible in MN? The evident answer is that negation is used not descriptively but metalinguistically. Hence, pragmatic analysis may provide an initial answer, either in terms of metarepresentation (Carston, Wilson), or in terms of speech act (Horn). In the metarepresentational analysis, negation scopes over the implicature of some, or ‘not all’, which makes the ‘not all’ and ‘all’ meanings compatible. In the speech act analysis, the contrast is between what the speaker can and cannot affirm:

From a logical perspective, both (43) and (44) are consistent. So, it seems that MN receives a non-contradictory interpretation, on condition that MN is analyzed pragmatically. In spite of this, I propose a simpler analysis, which is neither metarepresentational nor speech act-based; I intend to show that MN also has representational effects, which can be made explicit by resorting to COR entailments, scope of negation and connectives. On this basis, a pragmatic analysis will be proposed.

3.2 Entailment relations

I will first examine entailment relations. Gazdar (1979) provided one of the first semantic and pragmatic analyses of scalar implicature and presupposition. The notion at stake is potential vs. actual inferences – that is, potential implicatures (im-plicatures) and potential presuppositions (pre-suppositions), as opposed to actual implicatures and presuppositions.

The crucial point is that both generalized conversational implicature (as defined by Grice 1975)⁹ and lexical presupposition, shown in (45) and (46) respectively, can be defeated:

In Gazdar’s terms, potential quantitative implicatures are “all the implicatures which the sentence could possibly have prior to contextual cancellation” (Gazdar 1979: 55). Similarly, potential presuppositions, or pre-suppositions, are “what the presupposition would be if there was no “projection problem,” no “ambiguity” in negative sentences, and no context sensitivity” (Gazdar 1979: 124). In other words, the scalar implicature ‘not all students’ is a potential implicature of some of the students, cancelled by the parenthetical in fact all; equally, ‘Abi failed’ is a potential presupposition, cancelled by the corrective clause she passed. So, these cases are explained by the cancellation of a potential inference, valid before contextualization, and thus neither added to nor retrieved from the common ground.¹¹

Gazdar’s proposal, while incomplete, has one substantial positive point: it shows that entailments are stronger than implicatures and presuppositions. In order words, semantic meaning is stronger than pragmatic meaning.¹² I will follow Gazdar’s suggestion and make use of Moeschler’s proposal (2013b) on the relation between semantic and pragmatic meanings.

First, I will draw a distinction between two types of MN: MN1 scoping over a potential scalar implicature, and MN2 scoping over a potential presupposition.

3.3 Scope of MN1 and MN2

4.1 Criteria for DN

First, if COR entails NEG in cases of DN, this implies that negation scopes over POS. These two criteria are therefore entrenched. So, what about connectives? Au contraire is the connective stating a contrary relation. COR and POS are not in a contradiction relation (which is signaled by not in English, ne…pas in French). On the contrary, following Horn (1989), the semantic relation between antonyms is a contrary relation, as illustrated by the logical square in Figure 2:

Figure 2

The logical square for antonyms.

So, by saying Abi is not beautiful, NEG contains a lower bound negative predicate, which is entailed by its upper bound correspondence (she is ugly) – that is, the contrary of beautiful. Note that this can be inferred by implicature, which is not scalar, but rather an R-implicature in Horn’s (1984) terminology (R stands for the R-Principle, derived from the Gricean maxim of relation or relevance). By saying Abi is not beautiful, the speaker says what is necessary to allow a lower bound implicature to be inferable (‘Abi is ugly’). This implicature is conversational, since it can be cancelled, as shown in (76):

The two negative predicates (not beautiful, not ugly) are compatible, as they are subcontraries, and subcontraries can be true together – unlike contraries, which can only be false together, but not true together.

4.2 Criteria for MN1

Turning to MN1, the prediction is that the possible semantic and pragmatic relations are different: since COR entails POS, and POS is true, negation cannot scope over POS, and the only possible candidate is one aspect of POS meaning, which is to say SI_POS. In this case, the logical square is again useful: the scale <gorgeous, beautiful> is a positive quantitative scale, and gorgeous and not beautiful are contrary, as shown in Figure 3:

Figure 3

A logical square for positive scalar predicates.

So, saying not beautiful, from a purely semantic point of view, is saying something contrary to gorgeous. However, as gorgeous entails beautiful, to avoid contradiction, negation can only scope over its implicature, which is its subcontrary not gorgeous. As the implicature is defeated by MN1, a R-implicature from not gorgeous to not beautiful is not obtained. (77) summarizes this process (→ for ‘entails’, +> for ‘implicates’):

Still, (77) is the description not of a cognitive process, but only of a logical reconstruction. From a pragmatic cognitive perspective, what takes place is a process of assumption formation and confirmation. As stated by Sperber & Wilson, “the calculation of implicatures is a matter of non-demonstrative inference. It involves a partly non-logical process of assumption formation and confirmation” (Sperber & Wilson 1995: 201):²¹

As we see, COR confirms what is expected by treating negation as wide scope in (78a) – that is, as negating POS implicature (‘Abi is not gorgeous’). As entailments are stronger than implicatures, the assumption formed in (78a) is confirmed by COR in (78b).

This leads to a very important conclusion: COR is not defeating an initial comprehension process, where negation is descriptive; on the contrary, it confirms what is assumed, which is to say the cancellation of SI_POS. However, one can imagine a situation where the narrow scope interpretation of NEG is canceled. I hypothesize that this is what happens in humor. As an example of such a process, consider the famous joke by the French humorist Pierre Desproges:²²

In (79), there is a real trap by Desproges. He wants the audience to infer (80), but his corrective clause defeats it, as shown in (81):

It is important to emphasize that the implicature (80) is highly expected in French, because of the syntactic construction ne pas écrire que des conneries ‘not just writing bullshit’, where the restrictor ne…pas que ‘not just’ gives rise to a set of alternatives (Alt) for bullshit:

As a result, the corrective clause Elle en a aussi filmé ‘She has filmed some, too’ is highly unexpected, because the set of alternatives has changed:

The effect is a manipulation, since it is unexpected, and, of course, gives rise to non-propositional effects such as laughter.

The last point concerns the compatibility of connectives: what about the contrastive connective mais ‘but’ and parce que ‘because’? The causal connective explains why the speaker cannot affirm POS, and so receives a speech act interpretation. In other words, when parce que occurs, as in (84), the only possible reading is a speech act reading:

So, the explanation (because she is gorgeous) looks like a justification for not saying Abi is beautiful. Indeed, the entailment between gorgeous and beautiful is sufficient. So, the processing of (84) is restricted to (85):

The story becomes more complex with mais, as in (86):

What is required here is that the connective mais ‘but’ be compatible with the set of entailments of COR and the scope of negation. As mais is a contrastive connective, the conclusion drawn from NEG and the conclusion drawn for COR should be contradictory. This is easily demonstrable. Suppose that Abi is applying for the role of Juliet in a theatre company. Speaker A claims that Abi is beautiful, which should be a positive argument for hiring her. However, speaker B thinks that this argument is not enough, and then he wants to use a stronger argument (Abi is gorgeous):

From the contribution of mais, both entailments and scope can be explained. For one, as the second conjunct is stronger than the first, the entailment relation between COR and POS is explained on the grounds that gorgeous semantically entails ‘beautiful’. Then, COR contradicts the POS scalar implicature, and, as COR is introduced by mais, it is stronger than NEG.

4.3 Criteria for MN2

I will now turn to the relations between COR entailments, the scope of negation and connectives in MN2. COR entails both NEG and POS presupposition, which means that negation scopes over POS and its presupposition. As regards the causal connective, what must be stressed is that a metalinguistic reading hardly be obtained alone. For instance, the reply in (88B) is highly implausible, because the presupposition belongs to the common ground, and cannot be removed without a negative utterance:

So, why do we have a causal or explanation connective introducing COR? As shown in 4.2, a causal connective introduces a justification of a negative utterance with a wide scope negation. As such, a wide scope interpretation means that what is proposed to belong to the common ground or expected already to be in the common ground must be rejected or retrieved. The simplest way to do so is to negate both the assertion and its presupposition (89). However, this move is not enough, simply because what NEG can do is refute the addition of POS to the common ground. So, the best way to do this is by either presenting it as new information, introduced by parce que ‘because’, or old information with puisque ‘since’, which contradicts what is believed to belong to the common ground (Zufferey 2012). This could not be accomplished by a corrective clause nor by a contrastive connective, such as on the contrary or but, because COR in MN2 introduces the negation of POS presupposition (89), while mais can either introduce the negation of POS implicature in MN1, or indirectly negate POS via its entailment (NEG) in DN (90):

4.4 The big picture

As a conclusion to this section, there are strong arguments for putting forward a semantic and pragmatic distinction between three types of negation: DN, MN1 and MN2. Table 5 gives a more precise picture of the different types of propositional effects involved in the three uses of negation:

However, some cells in Table 5 still require further comment. First, the entailment of not-P can be positive or negative: when there is a categorical relation between P and Q – as CHOW(x) → DOG(x) –, Q is not always the case:

Second, in MN1, not-P is erased (not-P), because MN1 entails both P and the negation of its implicature (not-Q), while its implicature is also erased (Q). Third, the simplest case is MN2, where not-P erases its presupposition Q (Q).

One key point, observed in Table 5, is that MN2 requires that COR equals the overt negation of POS presupposition. The presence of a positive clause in Abi does not regret having failed, since she passed is simply due to the entailment of COR: Abi passed entails Abi did not fail.

5.1 MN and incorporation

First, metalinguistic negation is not incorporated. This means that the morphological negator (negative prefix) un-/in- cannot be used for MN, as shown in (92) (Horn 1989: 392):

Note that when negation is lexically incorporated, the same impossibility occurs:

This being highly uncontroversial, one legitimate question is to ask why it is the case. Remember that DN and MN are indicated by normal sentence negation, like (do) not in English, and ne…pas in French. The necessity of sentence negation shows why negation can trigger a wide scope reading. Being incorporated into a predicate makes the wide scope reading impossible. In other words, negation prefixes, as well as constituent negation constructions, cannot have MN uses because they cannot have wide scope. Moreover, the relation between a negative-marked predicate and its positive counterpart generally gives rise to a contrary relation, and not to a contradictory one. However, both DN and MN trigger contradiction relations, rather than contrary ones.

5.2 MN and NPIs

Second, metalinguistic negation is generally incompatible with NPIs (negative polarity items):²⁴

Again, what could be the explanation? Manifestly, without COR, we find the inverse distribution of quantifiers:

Interestingly enough, if we invert the order between the negation and quantifier, the order some not can give rise to both descriptive and metalinguistic uses:

So, apparently, the incompatibility with NPIs is more a syntactic constraint than a semantic one. This hypothesis can be tested with the French NPI ne pas lever le petit doigt ‘not to lift a finger’:

The metalinguistic reading is bizarre, because of the improbable reading of the literal (non-figurative) correlate in French:

In other words, these two tests (incorporation and NPI) are incompatible with MN. I conjecture that this is because of the meaning of negation in the negative clauses being either lexical or idiomatically descriptive.²⁵

5.3 SN and PA, DN and MN

The mais-test is based on Anscombre & Ducrot’s (1977) distinction between two mais in French, labelled mais_SN (for Ger. sondern and Sp. sino), and mais_PA (for Ger. aber and Sp. pero). Horn’s position is that MN1 licenses mais_SN, whereas DN triggers mais_PA:

His main argument is based on an observation by Anscombre & Ducrot (1977), according to which mais_SN cannot be followed by a full corrective clause, as the contrast between (102) and (103) shows:

However, there are three issues with this analysis. The first issue is linked to a unproved assumption by Anscombre and Ducrot: “We have grounded our description of PA on the assumption that when it follows negation, it can only be a descriptive negation, and not a polemic one” (Anscombre & Ducrot 1977: 32).²⁶ However, no argument is provided to support this assumption. Then, if we use genuine examples where the first conjunct is negative, the function and the meaning of mais is not the same: mais_SN is corrective, whereas mais_PA is contrastive, allowing for an argumentative function. Finally, related to this, and confirming the initial analysis of these connectives here, mais_SN is preferably followed by au contraire ‘on the contrary’, whereas mais_PA prefers pourtant ‘however’ or en revanche ‘rather’. (104) and (105) are illustrations of these two properties:

An application of the second connective criterion to our DN and MN1 examples confirms that en revanche/pourtant ‘rather/however’ cannot follow mais_SN, nor can au contraire ‘on the contrary’ follow mais_PA.

Remember that the test for DN is au contraire ‘on the contrary’. So, my analysis, which is confirmed by (106) and (107), gives the opposite result of Horn’s analysis: mais_SN is associated with DN, and only mais_PA can introduce COR in MN1. German, which makes a clear lexical distinction between sondern (SN) und aber (PA), further corroborates this point to a certain extent. Clearly, sondern is compatible with DN and MN1, as (108) shows:

So, it appears that DN licenses SN, and MN1 licenses PA in some languages and SN in others, as Table 6 shows:

In a nutshell, it seems that the mais-test is operative, but not in the sense predicted by Horn. That said, two points must be explained further: the first is linked to the syntactic constraint responsible for the difficulty of having a full COR clause following mais_PA; the other is the explanation of how and why mais_PA can be compatible with MN1.

5.4 Syntactic or semantic constraint on PA?

How can it be explained that (109), unlike (110) and (111), is grammatically awkward?

One could argue as follows: what is contrasted is belle ‘beautiful’ and extraordinaire ‘gorgeous’, and this contrast is obtained by what is under the scope of negation, that is, the scalar implicature of belle ‘beautiful’. In other words, since the scalar implicature of belle ‘beautiful’ is ‘no more than beautiful’ or ‘not gorgeous’, the lexical contrast allows for a syntactic short-cut, i.e. a contrast which may or may not be made explicit, as in (110) or (111).

How, then, can it be explained that this constraint is not applicable to mais_SN, as (112) to (114) show?

What the speaker is doing in (112) is a correction, which is somehow less acceptable when it does not target the contrary of POS but an intermediary predicate, such as ordinaire ‘ordinary’:

A correction is a two-place relation, but a single speech act. This is explicitly assumed by Anscombre & Ducrot (1977: 40), who argue that mais_SN must follow the complex negation non pas ‘not’, as (116) shows:

Now, we have a clear-cut prediction: if non pas + ADJ ‘not + ADJ’ is followed by a lower-bound adjective, then DN licenses SN, and if non pas + ADJ cannot be followed by an upper-bound adjective, then it confirms that MN1 licenses PA. This exactly what we find:

So, it seems that NEG + COR with DN realizes only one speech act, whereas NEG + COR with MN1 realizes two speech acts. The next section will provide evidence for this claim.

5.5 Why and how is PA compatible with MN?

So far, I have essentially made two claims: a) MN1 is followed by mais_PA; b) the sequence NEG, mais_PA COR realizes two speech acts. So, what are the arguments in favor of these two claims? First, as was shown in the previous section, this analysis of MN1 is neither metarepresentational, nor speech act-based, but representational, i.e. having truth-conditional effects. So, the kind of effect obtained should be compatible with a representational analysis and a speech act analysis. As COR entails POS and MN1 scopes over POS implicature, what is expected is that the inferences obtained are compatible with the procedural meaning of mais_PA. The semantics of this, given by Anscombre & Ducrot (1977: 28), is the following:

“Let p and q two sentences: uttering p PA q is

1. Presenting p as a possible argument for a possible conclusion r.

2. Presenting q as an argument against that conclusion, i.e. […] as an argument for ¬r.

3. Attributing to q more argumentative strength in favour of ¬r than in favour of r. The sequence p PA q, as a whole, is thus argumentatively oriented in favour of ¬r.”²⁸

So, what could be the argumentative analysis of Abi n’est pas belle, mais extraordinaire ‘Abi is not beautiful but gorgeous’? First, p, which corresponds to NEG, is opposed to p’ Abi est belle ‘Abi is beautiful’ – that is, POS. As per my analysis, negation – having wide scope – would scope over p’s implicature, that is ‘Abi is not gorgeous’. In other words, p content (NEG) can be translated as ‘Abi is not gorgeous’. This content is an argument for a conclusion: for instance, ‘Abi cannot play Juliet’, because the speaker is looking for a gorgeous young lady for Juliet’s character. q can be reconstructed as ‘Abi is gorgeous’, which allows for the conclusion that ‘Abi can play Juliet’. And finally, the whole sequence of two utterances gives rise to the same conclusion: ‘Abi can play Juliet’. In this respect, my description of MN1 is compatible with Anscombre & Ducrot’s analysis of mais_PA.

The second point to clarify is why we can say that the speaker realizes not one but two speech acts with MN1 followed by mais_PA. The argumentative analysis provides an initial answer: p being an argument for r and q an argument for ¬r means that the speaker realizes two acts of argumentation. However, another argument, coming from truth-conditional pragmatics (Moeschler 2018a), is possible. As the complete utterance Abi n’est pas belle, mais extraordinaire gives rise to a conflict between two contradictory conclusions, these two conclusions cannot be assumed by the same speaker in the same speech act. Moreover, from an interpretative perspective, an inferential process of assumption formation and confirmation takes place, as shown in (78). This process is accomplished when the implicature ‘it is not the case that Abi is not gorgeous’, derived from Abi is not beautiful, is confirmed by the entailment of COR which has the same content representation. So, it makes sense to attribute to the process of assumption formation the status of one speech act, and to the process of assumption confirmation the status of a second speech act.

Finally, one might wonder what makes the difference in meaning between sequences with mais and without mais. This with or without issue (WWI) has recently been addressed in Moeschler (2018b), as follows. In the case of MN1, it is assumed that “with upward negation, mais introduces a contrastive focus, and further implicatures, following POS strengthening, are linked to the implicatures accessible from COR”. In other words, COR receives via mais a focal position, whereas without mais, COR is simply a specification of the entailment domain of POS. As an illustration, the upward reading with and without mais_PA receives the following descriptions:

As expected, the same contrast is evident in DN cases, with or without a connective. The strategy with the connective is the following: “With downward negation, mais introduces a corrective focus, and all contextual implications are consequences of the suppressing effects of POS and the implicatures accessible from POS” (Moeschler 2018b). Consequently, the DN sequences with and without mais_SN are as follows:

Succinctly put, in Abi n’est pas belle, mais ordinaire ‘Abi is not beautiful, but ordinary’, the possible correction via an overt connective and a full clause can be explained by the same semantic status of both NEG and COR: COR simply replaces NEG. In MN1, COR does not replace NEG. So, there is no semantic equivalence, and mais ‘but’ cannot introduce a complete clause – see the unacceptability of (115).