THE DENIED PREDICATE AND ITS APPEARANCE IN THE NOVEL DEAD AND ALIVE BY THE SERBIAN AUTHOR IVAN ZLATKOVIĆ

Abstract

This work will be about the denied predicate and its appearance in the novel Dead and Alive by the Serbian author Ivan Zlatkovic. It has been largely acknowledged in semantics that action sentences denote events, but we want to find out what happens when these sentences are denied. Precisely, we will check whether they denote only the states in that case. It is believed that a negative action phrase presents something that did not happen and that they introduce some sort of negative event. For this, we ask the question of whether it is possible that a negative sentence presents action and can denote an event. Some linguists including Kamp and Reyle (1993) believe that the negative sentences do not describe eventualities but denote facts to which a reference point in time normally cannot be assigned. Since negation often implies a pause in the action, whereby the given possibility is negated and points out the absence of it, our goal is to indicate the occurrence of a negated event by which it still can be stated the existence and happening of the certain action with its own temporal referent depending on its pragmatic environment, that is crucial for our interpretation of the given event. The objective of this article is to describe the problem of negated events and the negation of rupture. In this regard, we demonstrate how linguists Saussure (2000), Kamp and Reyle (1993), as well as Amsili and Le Draoulec (1996) approached it. It should be noted that this term negation of rupture (négation de rupture in French) implies the reaction of the subject to the absence of an expected event that takes place outside the habit of the subject or the agent of the sentence (Saussure 2000, 260). We gave the example in affirmative and negative form with the same meaning (Jovan ne s’est pas arrêté au signe du policier- Jovan a continué à sa route au dépit du signe du policier (Jovan didn’t stop his car despite the sign of the police officer). Despite the fact that the positive expression and its negated form point to the same meaning, it is very important to answer how we can determine the temporal discourse referent of negated events.