Metalinguistic negation: evidence from Korean and beyond

In exploring the universal phenomenon of what we define as Metalinguistic Negation (MN), including metalinguistic negation and denial, the goal of this paper is to offer a semantic analysis of MN in language as an indicator of subjective mode in negation. We show that as a marker of subjective negation, MN expresses objection to a proposition (previous utterance), often with the speaker’s neutral to negative emotional stance. In doing so, we make four points regarding MN. First, we compare MN with other metalinguistic phenomena, especially metalinguistic comparatives (MC), and show that MN can be categorized into four types: (i) appropriateness-assessment MN, (ii) emphatic denial MN, (iii) negative emphatic denial MN, and (iv) irony MN. Second, we show how MN differs from regular negation (objective anti-veridicality), suggesting that MN markers originate from six semantic sources depending on the speaker’s personal motives for objection. Third, we propose the semantics of MN as subjective anti-veridicality (à la Giannakidou and Mari in Truth and veridicality in grammar and thought: Mood, modality, and propositional attitudes, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2021) that may concern the speaker’s epistemic, doxastic, or buletic commitment, regardless of actuality. Finally, we propose that most cases of MN, except for appropriateness-assessment MN, can be understood as a subspecies of subjective mode phenomena, akin to other perspectival phenomena such as expressives (Potts in The logic of conventional implicature, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005).