Irregular Negatives, Implicatures, and Idioms

Integrating and expanding on previous publications about irregular negations and their deployment in idiomatic speech, the author has developed this core aspect of his research into a systematic exposition of his latest thinking. As well as the volume's considered portrayal of the metalinguistic aspects of irregular negations, the implicatures they are given by idiomatic usage, and the pragmatic explicature theories that relate to them, additional sections of this substantive contribution to linguistics are devoted to supporting the author's thesis with revealing analogies that at the same time shed light on other linguistic expressions which have puzzled both linguists and philosophers. § This book goes further to explore previously unclassified irregular question formulations with an identical form (and identical negation) to its regular counterpart, but a divergent interpretation. The analysis also extends to unadorned numerical noun phrases such as 'two girls', whose much-debated indeterminacy cannot, in the author's view, be explained by theories such as the 'free enrichment' theory advocated by Carston, any more than it can be attributed to lexical or syntactic factors. Instead, this study posits a requirement for added conceptual support to render these phrases determinate and in doing so argues for a redrawn definition of the linguistic characteristics of idioms more generally. §