The Particular Negative: A Distributional Study on Some Aspects of Meaning Contradicting Logical Equivalence

摘要

The main aim of this paper is to reflect upon some aspects of meaning related to two different ways of expressing the same proposition type in English. The proposition type under discussion is the particular negative, and it is accounted for as introduced by either not all or some followed by a verbal negation. Two statements serving as examples of the two expressions are: 1- Not all birds can fly; 2- Some birds cannot fly. The theoretical assumption underlying this paper is that two logically equivalent quantified expressions might not be equivalent from certain semantic and conversational points of view, and that, conversely, two expressions that are equivalent from a conversational point of view might not be equivalent from a logical one. The research has been carried out by means of a distributional study: by exploring the contexts of occurrence of our two particular negative expressions throughout the ukWaC corpus we have detected some systematic use and aspects of meaning specific to each of them.