Negation is one of the most discussed phenomena within linguistics, on all language levels though it never seems to be exhausted. This operator establishes complex sentence structures and constantly challenges - from a cognitive, syntactical, semantic and morphologic viewpoint - presuppositions on language internal relations as rational and logic. It arouses therefore interest through all fields within language sciences. From a pragmatic perspective, where negation is conceived a marked structure, using negation often produces meanings beyond the one of a reversed affirmation "it is not the case that X". This book explores the various uses and pragmatic meanings of negation in authentic communication, in different text types and in different languages, predominately romance languages. The multilingual composition marries a macro-micro perspective where aspects of genre, sociocultural context, memory, rhetoric and argumentation interplay with the negative morpheme's nature and embedded instructions.

Preface --Introduction / Malin Roitman -- Reinforcements of negatives : pragmatic uses and discursive meanings -- Metalinguistic negation and rejection discourse markers in Spanish / María Marta García Negroni -- Metalinguistic negation and explicit echo, with reference to English and Spanish / Inés Olza -- Metalinguistic negation vs. descriptive negation : among their kin and foes / Chungmin Lee -- Intervention effects are (lack of) informativity : the case of negative interrogatives / Pierre Larrivée -- Discourse-pragmatic change and emphatic negation in spoken French : or coming full circle / Bonnie B. Fonseca-Greber -- Negation and linguistic polyphony -- Interpretations of the French negation ne...pas / Henning Nølke -- French negation as a marker of (external, internal) polyphony / Merete Birkelund -- Negation and polyphony in discourse analysis -- Negation as a rhetorical tool in climate change discourse / Øyvind Gjerstad and Kjersti Fløttum -- Negation and straw man fallacy in French election debates 1974-2012 / Malin Roitman -- References -- Index.