It goes without saying (though I will say it anyway)

Sažetak: It is not very frequently assumed that negation may play an active role in achieving specific conceptual frames, but as claimed by Langacker (2008) or Lakoff (2004), language enables the actual physical presence of words, even if in some kind of a negative construction, to create the positive conception of what is being denied. Our research focuses on the phenomenon of praeteritio or apophasis as a rhetorical device in political discourse, where we noticed a frequent use of various types of negation constructions as introductory lines for the content which is actually not being negated but rather accentuated. Structures like ‘It goes without saying…’, ‘We don’t want to mention that…’, etc., which are then followed by actual descriptions of affected participants or events, have been spotted in our corpus of public political speech events, particularly in the media discourse and in other types of discourse involved in shaping public opinion. The cognitive and pragmatic functions of apophatic structures in the elicited corpus are analysed as well as their role in creating the persuasive force of this rhetorical device. Their iconic nature and psycholinguistic background are used as a vehicle to explain their unique position in the process of conceptualization of the world around us.