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.

Free indirect discourse has traditionally been described as a form of reported speech or thought. It seems to be a mixture of both direct discourse (in allowing exclamatives, interrogatives, etc.) and indirect discourse (in following sequences of tenses and pronouns). It has been the object of more interest from literary theorists than from linguists, though Banfield (1982) offered what is still the best syntactic description of the phenomenon, and contemporary semantic accounts have brought new insights into it. Schlenker (2004) made decisive progress in proposing an account of two contexts and indexical shifting. Maier (2015) proposes an alternative quotational analyses, which Eckardt (2015) rejects, going back to Schlenker's model, suitably amended to answer Maier's criticism. We present these theories, criticize them, and propose an extension of the Schlenker–Eckardt model.

This article aims at clarifying the role of person at the interface between syntax and the interpretive systems. We argue that first person interpretations of third person pronouns (de se readings) stem from the option of leaving the referential index underspecified on the pronoun, thus accounting for the interplay of this phenomenon with the anaphoric usage of first person indexicals (pronoun shifting) and logophoric pronouns. The results include proposals on the connection between the semantics of first person and the syntax of the left periphery, a neo-Davidsonian treatment of the semantics of first person indexicals, and a novel view of pronominal anaphora according to which Higginbotham's (1983) asymmetric relation of linking involves a mechanism of θ-role inheritance tied to the semantics of first person.

Recent experimental results suggest that negation is particularly challenging for children with reading difficulties. This study looks at how young poor readers, speakers of Mandarin Chinese, comprehend affirmative and negative sentences as compared with a group of age-matched typical readers. Forty-four Chinese children were tested with a truth value judgment task. The results reveal that negative sentences were harder to process than affirmative ones, irrespective of the distinction between poor and typical readers. Moreover, poor readers performed worse than typical readers in comprehending sentences, regardless of whether they were affirmative or negative sentences. We interpret the results as (a) confirming the two-step simulation hypothesis, based on the result that the difficulty in processing negation has a general validity (persisting in pragmatically felicitous contexts), and (b) disconfirming that negation, as far as behavioral data are concerned, can be used as a reliable linguistic predictor of reading difficulties.