Czech Negation from the Formal Perspective
Mojmír Dočekal
Masaryk University
The book begins with a chapter on different frameworks in current formal semantics, selecting among them Language of Plurality and Events (LoPE), as this framework is well suited for the formal treatment of interactions between negation and other logical operators in natural language sentences. There are detailed discussions of negative NPs, negation and aspect, negation and plurality, negation and the scope of quantifiers in the following chapters; and a chapter on negation in questions; a novel treatment of surprising lack of ambiguity in sentences containing negation and universal quantifiers is presented in Chapter 4.
The book focuses on Czech negation but in most cases it does so from the contrastive semantic perspective, where Slavonic and Germanic languages are compared. The book is guided by the view that negation in natural language should be treated as classical truth-reversing operator (despite the prima facie evidence against it) and shows how to realize this idea in the formal framework of LoPE. It will be of interest to linguists, especially formal semanticist, as well as to logicians interested in natural language semantics and even to non-formal linguists working on natural language negation.
ISBN 9783862886647 (Hardbound). LINCOM Studies in Slavic Linguistics 39. 160pp. 2015.
