Submission deadline: March 9, 2025

In Frege’s work, negation is a simple, fundamental symbol. It operates on truth values for sentences (unless a presupposition of that sentence fails to be true), it interacts in scope with other operators and it is used in order to express (various kinds of) opposition in combination with those operators. In typed versions of logic, negation is a cross-categorial operation that is interpreted as the complement function. The type-flexibility then mirrors the flexibility of the attachment sites for expressions of negation in natural language. But this makes it difficult to understand why negative expressions in natural language are rather diverse (even within one language) and subject to renewal in language change.

There is a whole range of other proposals, today, that capture negation as a different, possibly more complex element. As is well known, dynamic negation, for example, introduces existential closure on indefinites in its scope in order to capture anaphoric relations between sentences. Event-based accounts motivate event negation in order to capture perception reports, for example. Moreover, there are proposals that take the contribution of negative expressions in language use into account and use cancellation, denial, or rejection as basic expressions instead of classical negation.

This workshop aims at bringing together linguists and philosophers who discuss linguistic phenomena as evidence (or counter-evidence) for the complex or non-classical nature of negation.

We invite theoretical and empirical papers on negation related (but not restricted) to the following questions: