ABSTRACT
In Part III, I distinguished four possible types of multiple negation: • nothing happens semantically; • the two negations weaken each other; • the two negations cancel each other; and • the two negations enhance each other. With respect to the first type I discussed, and tried to account for, some of the immense variation one finds in negative concord constructions across languages. In the third chapter of Part III, I argued that Horn’s theory of litotes should be extended in order to be able to account for the fact that negation is not the only trigger of the phenomenon. The short fourth chapter showed that the notion of denial covers more than two negations resulting in an affirmative; and in the fifth chapter I discussed some of the possible ways of strengthening the negative force of an utterance by means of additional negative elements.
