Affirm-deny
In a couple of previous posts I explored a bit of the meaning of the sequence no yeah (and yeah no) as (roughly) a part-denial/part-affirmation technique. Though I haven’t thought about it in super-great detail since those posts, I did realize something rather obvious this morning. Namely, there is some severe lexical restriction going on. For the yeah-no version, it basically really is the lexical items yeah and no that go into this phrase. The yeah part can sometimes be replaced with words into the same family: yup and uh-huh also are sorta okay. Yes, though, is pretty bad. Similarly, for no-yeah, you can also replace the no with some other words. But in general, the first word can be fiddled with, but the second one is more fixed. So it can’t simply be that a combination of affirmation and denial get you the semantics and pragmatics of yeah-no and no-yeah: you need, it seems, to take into account the meanings of those particular lexical items.
And then this brings up the potentially thorny issue of “pragmatic compositionality.” That is, though there are constructions that specify idiosyncratic (truth-conditional) semantics to certain combinations of words or phrases; but are there any that assign unpredictable pragmatics to a combination of already pragmatically-rich lexical items? Actually, I can probably already answer that question in the positive, since Japanese yo-ne has a usage that is really hard to get just by combining yo and ne. (Yes, I know, many have tried, and I reviewed some of that literature for my honors thesis a few years ago; let’s just say that any claim that yo-ne is compositional must first have a full account of the two words individually, which I guarantee doesn’t exist.)
[And, after some consultations with colleagues, another possibility is the may...but construction. It contains a may which expresses concession, even though usually it has either has permission-giving (deontic) or possibility-asserting (epistemic) meaning. Granted, in this construction its use is epistemic in a certain way, but surely in a slightly different way than normal. However, the meaning of but remains what it usually is, so far as I can tell.]