Metalinguistic negation of proper names: Evidence from Russian

This paper examines metalinguistic negation of proper names on the data from the Russian National Corpus, including its pragmatic functions, its performance with regards to other cases of metalinguistic negation, and the opposition between explicit and implicit use of the metalinguistic predicate. The data showed that the speaker's most common aim is to reject a particular representation of the name owner in favor of another representation. Next, we discovered that metalinguistic negation is more natural in corrections of content ascribed to speaker than in reactions to a preceding interlocutor's comment. Finally, the metalinguistic predicate of naming can be expressed not only lexically, but also be part of the meaning of some syntactic constructions.