Negation in Exclamatives

The goal of this article is to provide a principled account of the
semantic contribution of the so-called “expletive” negation, as it occurs in
negative exclamatives. This type of negation differs from canonical negation in
that it does not contribute its canonical meaning as a propositional operator,
occurs higher in the syntactic structure of the clause, does not license negative
polarity items, and expresses a bias towards the opposite polarity. In this article,
we show that these properties are also found in negative rhetorical questions. We
propose that exclamatives, as well as rhetorical questions, denote sets of
propositions structured into Boolean algebras, with the negation imposing an
order of informativity upon such structures.