UM holds Macao Humanities Forum

MACAU, May 13 - The Faculty of Arts and Humanities (FAH) at the University of Macau (UM) held the Macao Humanities Forum, where Ana Maria Martins, professor and chairperson of the School Council in the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Lisbon, delivered a lecture titled ‘Saying no without “no”. Other faces of negation’. The lecture was well attended by students and faculty members.

Speaking at the event, Joaquim Kuong, assistant dean of FAH, highlighted that Macao has a long history of serving as a cultural bridge between China and Portugal, and its unique multicultural environment provides fertile ground for academic exchange. He added that language develops and evolves continuously through daily usage and interpersonal interaction, and Prof Martins’s research provides important scholarly support for this view, significantly deepening our understanding of the nature of language. João Veloso, head of the Department of Portuguese in FAH, introduced Prof Martins’ academic background and achievements. Prof Martins is a leading scholar in the fields of contemporary Portuguese studies and historical linguistics. She is a co-editor of the journal Estudos de Linguística Galega, and has published several influential works with major international publishers, including Word Order Change, co-edited with Adriana Cardoso and published by Oxford University Press, and The Syntax of Portuguese, co-authored with Mary A. Kato and Jairo Nunes and published by Cambridge University Press.

During the lecture, Prof Martins focused on ‘metalinguistic negation’, a concept proposed by American linguist Laurence R. Horn, to examine how objection is conveyed in different languages from a cross-linguistic perspective. Using a variety of examples from different languages, she showed how different languages express disagreement or rejection through non-standard negative devices, which she refers to as metalinguistic negation (MN) markers. MN markers cover a range of linguistic devices: (1) idioms and swear words, such as like hell in English, mon oeil (‘my eye’) in French, and uma ova (‘fish roe’) in Portuguese; (2) locative and temporal deictics, such as lá (‘there’) and agora (‘now’) in Portuguese; and (3) wh-words, such as qual (‘which’) in Portuguese, 哪裏 (‘where’) in Mandarin, 邊度 (‘where’) in Cantonese, and mwusun (‘what/which’) in Korean. Prof Martins pointed out that, languages possess grammatical constructions that unambiguously convey metalinguistic negation, even though these constructions do not usually express descriptive negation. This illustrates the cognitive reality of metalinguistic negation and the complex grammatical integration of MN markers.

During the Q&A session, Prof Martins engaged in an in-depth discussion with UM students and faculty on the distinction between rhetorical questions and polar questions as forms of metalinguistic negation. She noted that the two categories differ in their expected response and pragmatic function.

This was the fourth lecture of the Macao Humanities Forum for the 2025/2026 academic year. Every year, the forum invites distinguished scholars in different fields of the humanities to share their latest research findings with students and faculty members in Macao. Previous lectures of the forum have covered a wide range of topics, including literature, linguistics, history, translation, and arts.