The semantics of high negation

The goal of this paper is to provide a compositional account of high negation – negation that occurs in the left periphery and makes an expressive contribution – across a wide variety of constructions. I propose that negation, like other natural language expressions, is anaphoric: it can either associate with content inside of or prior to the present utterance, and it can only do the latter when it’s high. This ‘exophoric’ interpretation of high negation involves anaphora to some prior claim or expectation, instead of the descriptive content of the utterance it occurs in. I argue that this account solves some empirical puzzles for high negation questions introduced in Frana and Rawlins (2019) while avoiding positing that all languages lexicalize two distinct negation meanings in a homophonous morpheme.