DESCRIPTIVE AND INTERPRETIVE USE IN THE ANALYSIS OF NEGATION ELENA ALBU Universitatea din Bucureşti 1. Introduction The aim of this paper is to discuss the mental configuration of negation in natural language use. Our study is based on the premise that the descriptive use (DU) and the interpretive use (IU) lay the foundation of how information is mentally configured in verbal communication. The approach uses the tools and methods provided by Relevance Theory (RT) (Sperber, Wilson 1995). In our approach we depart from the classical view on negation and concentrate on the action the negative operator „not” (Rom. „nu”) has on the material found in its scope. We introduce the notion of negative structure (NS) in the attempt to delimit between the mental configuration and the discursive pattern of the structure generated by the negative operator. The mental configuration regards the manner in which the NS functions from a cognitive point of view, with an emphasis on what inferences are triggered and what cognitive effects are generated. We have created correspondent glossing formulas for each NS in order to point out the manner in which they are generated and the relationships among the existing components. On the other hand, the discursive pattern concerns the linguistic representation and the discursive organization of each NS. The data are represented by the TV political debate, „Sinteza zilei” 1 , broadcast live on the 8th March 2010. This edition is rather special, divided in two parts. The host invites the leaders of two political parties, each part being dedicated to one of them. We have opted for a single political debate in the attempt to offer a clear image of how NSs are used by the participants in order to achieve their communicative goals in an on-going dialogue. Although the examples represent authentic Romanian data 2 , it is our belief that the configuration of the two uses, DU and IU, is universal, generating structures that trigger the same interpretation in all contexts. In order to achieve our goals, we shall proceed as follows: in section 2 we shall briefly describe the RT framework and introduce the dichotomy between DU and IU in 1 We have collected the debates from the political parties’ websites and politicians’ personal websites: http://www.psd.ro/transcripte.php and http://www.crinantonescu.ro/Public/cat/14/Noutati.html . 2 We have opted for a literal translation. We have kept the word order of the original material and we have opted for the expression of some linguistic elements and for the omission of others in accordance with the Romanian grammatical rules and patterns. 1