Under `disclaim' (which includes Deny and Counter-Expect) we are concerned with resources by which some prior utterance or some alternative position is invoked so as to be rejected, replaced or dismissed as irrelevant or some way communicatively inactive. From a dialogistic perspective, we can see Denial (negation) as a resource for introducing the alternative positive position into the dialog, and hence acknowledging it and engaging with it, and then rejecting it. Thus in these interpersonal/dialogistic terms, the negative is not the simple logical opposite of the positive, since the negative carries with it the positive, while the positive does not reciprocally carry the negative.3 This aspect of the negative, though perhaps at odds with common-sense understandings, has been quite widely noted in the literature - see for example, Leech 1983: 1014, Pagano 1994 or Fairclough 1992: 121.) Consider, for example, the following extract from an advertisement placed in magazines by the British Heart Foundation.
We all like something to grab hold of. But sometimes you can have too much of a good thing. And a man whose table diet consists of double cheeseburgers and chips can end up looking like a tub of lard. There's nothing wrong with meat, bread and potatoes. But how about some lean meat, wholemeal bread and jacket potatoes?
Here the denial, `There is nothing wrong with meat, bread and potatoes', is clearly dialogic in the sense that it invokes, and presents itself as responding to, claims/beliefs that `This IS something wrong with meat, bread and potatoes'. A prior and alternative position is thus clearly engaged with dialogistically.
3 I have noted one instance where the positive did acknowledge the negative. On a sign at the verge of a wide expanse of neatly mown lawn by a footpath in Toronto, Canada, the following `Please Walk On The Grass.'
4 Leech makes essentially this point when he states, `In fact, the [Co-operative Principle] will predict that negative sentences tend to be used precisely in situations when... [the speaker] wants to deny some proposition which has been put forward or entertained by someone in the context (probably the addressee).
