Negative Inversion, Social Meaning, and Gricean Implicature

Relying on a wealth of new data, this book argues that long-standing puzzles of Negative Inversion (NI) syntax are not puzzles at all when viewed through the lenses of Gricean pragmatics and Labovian sociolinguistics. Focusing on sentences such as "Can''t nobody lift that rock" in African American, Anglo, and Chicano Englishes in Texas, the book provides tidy solutions to problems such as: the NI’...