Affixal negation and linguistic creativity: A corpus-based case study of negative affixes in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s discourse on race

Abstract

Linguistic negation has been described as a natural foregrounding device, with some researchers noting that foregrounding with negators is not always marked grammatically, but also semantically or through textual effect. However, most studies focus on the use of sentential negation (e.g., not, no ), whereas other expressions of negation, such as affixal negation, remain understudied. Recent research indicates that affixal negation is used by speakers to convey a variety of opposite meanings, often in creative and subtle ways. This study is a systematic investigation of the use of negative affixes in an oppositional discourse, namely discourse on race in the USA. The dataset is a specialized corpus, The Corpus of the Non-Fictional Writings by Ta-Nehisi Coates (COCO) (468,899 words, 1996–2018). Methodologically, the study combines corpus linguistic techniques with co(n)textual discourse analysis. The results show that affixal negation in COCO, particularly with the prefixes un-, non- and anti-, is used by Coates to disrupt patterns of collocations, fixed expressions or phrases, producing either lexically or semantically deviant instances. Thus, affixal negation has a foregrounding effect and a potential to introduce evaluative clashes in a discourse. The findings, examined through the lens of linguistic creativity, indicate that Coates employs affixal negation to perform various functions: from explicit foregrounding (e.g., as attention-seeking devices) to a subtle critique of societal norms and established institutional order (e.g., renaming concepts to offer an alternative perspective on reality).