A Natural History of Negation (review)

In addition to a reissue of Laurence Horn’s 1989 opus on negation (henceforth NHN), this volume includes a new introduction, appendices, and a supplementary bibliography. Because the book itself has been reviewed before (and has proved its value through its longevity), I concentrate on the new material here. The new introduction is really more of an afterword or epilogue, as one needs to be familiar with the contents of NHN before being able to appreciate the issues it covers. H notes the explosion of interest in negation in the 1990s, particularly the issues of where negation fits into syntactic theories and how negative polarity items are licensed. The introduction then turns to a chapter-by-chapter update on new work that concerns the issues in NHN. The focus throughout the introduction is more on citing what work has been done than on explaining it in any detail, so an impressive amount of literature is surveyed in just a few pages.

Appendix A provides a list of errata in the original edition. Appendix B lists reviews of the original edition. The supplemental bibliography lists around two hundred works relating to negation—most published since 1989, but also a few that were neglected in the original edition.

After these additions, the original 1989 text is reprinted. It lives up to its title by covering in depth: ‘Negation and opposition in classical logic’ (1–96), ‘Negation, presupposition, and the excluded middle’ (97–153), ‘Markedness and the psychology of negation’ (154–203), ‘Negation and quantity’ (204–67), ‘The pragmatics of contra(dicto)ry negation’ (268–361), ‘Metalinguistic negation’ (362–444), and ‘Negative form and negative function’ (445–518). In these chapters, H critically reviews twentyfive hundred years of thought on negation and opposition and provides his own solutions to some longstanding problems, such as scalar implicature and metalinguistic uses of negation. Throughout, the writing is clear and accessible, with H’s sense of humor often shining through. The topics, from Volapük affixal negation, to the double negation of not unattractive, to the postsentential ‘NOT!’ of Wayne’s world (in the new introduction), are often humorous in themselves. Since this is not a second edition of NHN, in that errors are left standing and new material is not incorporated into the chapters, it won’t be worth most people’s while to replace their old copy with the new one. But for those who do not yet own this treasure of a resource (and most enjoyable read), the reissue should be very welcome.