  Not every natural language negation is a contradictory operator, or even a logical operator. A statement may be rejected as false, as unwarranted, or as inappropriate—misleading, badly pronounced, wrongly focused, likely to induce unwanted implicatures or presuppositions, overly or insufficiently formal in register. Only in the first of these cases, as a toggle between truth and falsity, is it clear that contradictory negation is involved (Horn 1989, Smiley 1993). Sainsbury (2004) takes truth-functional contradictory negation to be a special case of a generalized option negation as a deselection operator: If there are two mutually exhaustive and exclusive options A and B, to select A is to deselect B. But the relevant options may involve not truth, but some other aspect of utterance form or meaning as in the standard examples of metalinguistic negation (Horn 1989; see the entry on  negation). In such cases, a speaker uses negation metalinguistically or echoically to object to a previous utterance on any grounds whatsoever, including its phonetic or grammatical form, register, or associated presuppositions or implicatures: “That's not a car, it's a Volkswagen”, “Cancer selection is not a but the major force in the emergence of complex animal life”, “He's not your old man, he's your father”, “We didn't call the POlice, we called the poLICE”. In such cases, the relevant target for deselection is what the right thing is to say in a particular context, where “truth is not sufficient for being right, and may not even be necessary” (Sainsbury 2004: 87). Thus the apparent LNC violation (if it's a Volkswagen, it both is and isn't a car) is not a real one.  