“Russia is not an adversary”: negation and construction of the social meaning in the press discourse

Abstract

The aim of the article is to show the role of syntactic negation ne pas in the construction of Russia’s social meaning in the French press discourse. The analysis allowed to distinguish three most common uses of negation: negation related to relational predicates, the effect of which is the remodeling of social meaning; negation in attributive sentences with a proper name as predicate, leading to indirect characterization of the referent; and negation of scalar predicates, which at first glance has an attenuation value, and simultaneously masks the features of the referent.