Approaches to negativity tags, like English neither-tags, ‘not even‘-tags, and why not, differ in whether they treat the antecedent as a clause with clausal negation (e.g., Klima 1964; Kramer and Rawlins 2009; Brasoveanu et al. 2013) or, more generally, one introducing a salient counterfactual proposition into the discourse (Hofmann 2022, 2023). This paper provides experimental evidence for the latter view, showing that negativity-tags are rated as natural (compared to an affirmative baseline) when their antecedent is introduced without clausal negation, but in an anti-veridical embedding (e.g., It’s a lie), under neg-raising (e.g., I don’t get the feeling), or with ‘lexical indicators of irony’ (Horn 2016, e.g., as if ).

The XPrag slides present Exp. 1 about counterfactual content, and Exp. 2 about at-issueness; The SuB slides present Exp. 1, as well as recipe for making negativity-tags, and a formal semantic analysis of negative additive tags.