Causals, Concessives, and the Scope of Negation
Articles
Thorstein Fretheim
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Published 2003-12-01
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How to Cite

Fretheim, T. (2003) “Causals, Concessives, and the Scope of Negation”, Kalbotyra, 53(3), pp. 18–25. Available at: https://www.journals.vu.lt/kalbotyra/article/view/23292 (Accessed: 21 November 2024).

Abstract

While wide-scope negation of a causal relation between two propositions P and Q – as in the English sentence I didn’t move because the rent was raised – is truth-conditionally underdetermined as to whether the speaker did or did not move and the rent was or was not raised, use of a concessive construction – I didn’t move although the rent was raised – eliminates the inherent vagueness of the negative causal construction, as it encodes the information that the rent was raised but that the speaker did not move because of/in spite of that. The intuitively felt resemblance between the causal truth-conditionally underdetermined construction and the concessive construction is claimed to have caused an Old Norse causal connective to be re-analysed as a non-truth-conditional concessive, for det (‘for that’), in modern Norwegian. For det is referred to as a ‘weak’ concessive with a procedural meaning in the sense of relevance theory, a meaning which will be pragmatically strengthened to a regular ‘strong’ concessive expressing the expectation that Q is false if P is true, in case considerations of relevance support the inferred ‘strong’ interpretation of the token in context.

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