of This Thesis
The whole thesis consists of five chapters.The first chapter is a brief introduction to the study. It elaborates the necessity thatliterature should be regarded as discourse and negation should be analysed in discourse.The second chapter is a literature review of negation, Paul Auster and his novel, City ofGlass. It comprises two parts. In the first part, a brief introduction to negation and theprevious researches on it are presented. The second part introduces Paul Auster and City ofGlass, which provides a background regarding the main themes of this novel.The third chapter offers the theoretical framework. It discusses negation based onconversational implicature, relevance theory and presupposition.The fourth chapter explores the functions of negation applying to the discussion ofrelevant extracts from the novel City ofGlass.Thelast chapter draws the conclusion based on the previous analysis. It recapitulates theimportant points of the thesis and points out the significance and limitations of this study.
Chapter Two Literature Review
This chapter contains two parts. The first part is the review of the previous studies onnegation, especially in linguistics research field. In the second part, it provides somebackground information about Paul Auster and his works. And then, it gives an introduction toone of his representative works, City ofGlassand reviews the previous researches on it.
2.1 Negation
2.1.1 An Overview of Negation
Negation can be termed as a universal linguistic phenomenon, and plays a very importantrole in everyday social interactions and sentence processing in language. Asher and Simpson(1994) point out: “negation is a linguistic universal; for cognitive and pragmatic reasons everylanguage must have the possibility of asserting that the state of affairs expressed by a sentenceis not true.” According to Quirk (1985), “negation makes a positive statement negative.”Bloom (1970) clarifies three primary meanings of negation as the following:(1) Nonexistence. For example, There is no special way of doing it—you just have to mixthe dough slowly.(2) Rejection. For example, I do not want any lunch.(3) Denial. For example, Birds do not build nests in autumn.However, Givón (1993) states “Logicians have traditionally considered negation only interms of truth- value; that is , as an operator that ‘reverse the truth- value of a proposition’”. Infact, negative sentences in languages, is far from simple. It can not always be comprehendedonly on the basis of logic. Negation in linguistics is much more complicated than that in logic.It semantically, syntactically and also pragmatically differs from affirmation.Depending on the various viewpoints, negation can be classified in many ways.According to Chomsky’s Transformational-Generative grammar, there are two levels of language structure, deep structure and surface structure. Surface structures with negativemeaning can be divided into explicit negation and implicit negation in the light of relationsbetween meaning and form. Some surface structures contain negators or negative affixes suchas no, not, un-, dis-. These kind of negative statements having obvious marks for negation arecalled explicit negation. Nevertheless, in linguistics, negative forms do not correspond tonegative meaning. On the one hand, negative forms, in many cases, mean affirmatively. Onthe other hand, negative meaning can be accomplished by other surface structure thannegative forms. In contrast to explicit negation, those negative statements which areaffirmative in form but negative in meaning are called implicit negation.Besides, Aritotle distinguishes contrary negation and contradictory negation in view ofmeaning. Jespersen (1924) divides negation into general neg
