Exploiting the Square of Opposition for expressive purposes

The O-corner of the Square of Opposition resists lexicalization in contrast to the A-, I- and E-corners. The present paper argues that this puzzling, cross-linguistic asymmetry becomes naturally explicable once we concede that logic has no more than the bare ownership of the “property” of the Square. It proposes in particular that there is a third party linked to this bare owner for the purpose of the operation of the property, namely, the expressivity of an involved speaker, built upon the contradictory corners of the Square: once the expressive-rhetorical speaker is recognized as the co-owner of the property of the Square, the (non-)lexicalization phenomena concerning its right-hand side are no longer inexplicable mysteries.