Negation in Akan: Linguistic Convention Versus Pragmatic Inference

Abstract

The present paper considers how a narrow scope of negation can be encoded by linguistic (rather than inferential) means in Akan (Kwa, Niger Congo). The paper consequently argues against the originally Gricean position that the scope of negation is invariably wide in the encoded logical form of negative natural language sentences, and that any narrow-scope interpretation of negation is due to pragmatic strengthening, as proposed by Robyn Carston. Akan displays a variety of ways in which the scope of negation is fixed by linguistic means, and it is argued that this is wholly due to procedural encoding of information on the scope of negation. The argument is supported by the ways in which a marked syntactic position of a negation marker and negative ‘it’-cleft constructions impact on the truth-theoretic interpretation of Akan utterances, suggesting that similar patterns may be found in other unrelated languages. In particular, I examine the interaction between Akan quantifier words involving the morpheme bi and the scope of negation. The approach taken in this paper is strongly inspired by Burton-Roberts’ Representational Hypothesis (RH).