Metalinguistic Negation and "wake de wa nai" in Japanese

Horn (2001: 377) proposes a descriptive/metalinguistic dichotomy of negation: descriptive negation is a truth-functional operator, focusing on propositional content and taking a proposition p into a proposition not-p (e.g. A pig doesn’t fly), and metalinguistic negation is a non-truth-functional operator, objecting to any aspects of an utterance except for its propositional content (e.g. Tom didn’t trap two mongeese; he trapped two mongooses). A Japanese negative sentence is usually formed by adding –na(i) ( ≒ English not) to the predicate at the end of the corresponding affirmative, as in Tom wa sushi o tabe-ru. (Tom eats sushi.) → Tom wa sushi o tabe nai. (Tom doesn’t eat sushi.). While it is hard for English to distinguish descriptive negation from metalinguistic negation based only on their forms, Japanese has another two types of negative operator marking external negation: node wa nai and wake de wa nai. Horn (2001) also suggests the universal status of the dichotomy above and refers to the Japanese wake de wa nai construction as ‘specialized for expressing metalinguistic negation.’ This paper provides the evidence to show that the wake de wa nai construction is not the one specialized for metalinguistic negation, and proposes the stipulation of the meaning encoded in wake de wa nai as a meta-conceptual negation : wake de wa nai denies the conclusion Q, which is drawn from the assumption P pre-existing in the context and correspondis to the representation embedded within the wake de wa nai construction, and objects to the validity of the inference P → Q. The result of this paper casts strong doubt on the universal status of Horn’s dichotomy of negation and suggests the possibility of new taxonomy of negation