Negation, Expectation and Ideology in Written Texts

During an election campaign in 2008, Ken Livingstone said to a newspaper reporter "e;this election is not a joke"e;. By doing so, he introduced an expectation into the discourse that someone does, in fact, think it is a joke. This book explores how it is that saying what is not the case communicates something about what is. Bringing together a focus on text with cognitive and pragmatic approaches,...