Abstract We do not only use language to avow our emotions but also to deny having them. Negative avowals – utterances such as “I’m not happy,” “I’m not scared,” or “I’m not angry” – raise an important but neglected question: how can the absence of a mental state be expressed in speech? I argue that negative avowals can, like positive ones, function as explicit expressive acts. This phenomenon, which I call expressive denegation , shows that speakers can make mental state absence itself linguistically manifest. To address the resulting puzzle, I develop propositional expressivism, on which what is expressed is not a mental state but a proposition about the speaker’s mental condition – namely, that she is (not) in the state named. This framework preserves the core insight of avowal expressivism while extending it to negative avowals.
Nadja-Mira Yolcu (Thu,) studied this question.