Steps Forward in the Pragmatic Understanding of Linguistic Negation

Abstract

Over the centuries, negation has attracted the interest of scholars from various fields. Negation aroused curiosity because of the divergence of the logical operator from its linguistic counterpart. Linguistic negation was soon pinned with a ‘marked’, ‘inferior’ status with respect to affirmation. In fact, psychological research confirmed that negation is associated to increased processing difficulties. These can in some occasions be alleviated if not eliminated altogether. Which contexts exactly make negation more or less hard to process and why, is still unclear, but the findings begin to be understood in light of a pragmatic view of negation. The current dissertation is aimed at contributing to our pragmatic understanding of linguistic negation and filling some of the gaps in the literature. Particularly, we focus on the role of alternatives and the question of when negations are produced. A typical use of negation is to reject a state of affairs. In so doing, negation might shift the attention to a different scenario (i.e. an alternative), namely the state of affairs that applies instead. Three studies were run. In the first study, we investigated the nature of plausible alternatives to negated entities through a series of cloze tasks. Specifically, we tested the hypothesis that alternatives to negation are peculiarly similar to the negated entity. Indeed, we show that the similarity of alternative entities in a negated context (e.g. She sees no goat, but she sees ...) exceeds that of alternatives in an affirmative context (e.g. She sees a goat and she sees...). In the second study, we investigated whether negation automatically activates a search for plausible alternatives. It is evinced that plausible alternatives can be activated automatically even when the choice of alternatives is not confined to one option, and especially if the alternative is very prominent. Thus, when comparing activation levels of plausible alternatives (e.g. pear) and semantically associated but implausible alternatives (e.g. seed) after affirmative and negative sentences (e.g. This is an apple vs This is not an apple), negation appears to activate plausible alternatives relatively more than affirmation. The third study investigated when people produce negation. Here, the focus was on whether negation production can be modulated by considerations of economy of effort when compared to a concurrent affirmation. Specifically, we investigated whether negation is produced more often when concurrent affirmative statements are particularly elaborate. In a series of experiments, subjects were presented with pairs of circles filled with different patterns and were asked to refer to the circle pointed to by an arrow using a referential expression. Some of the patterns were difficult to name. In fact, the more difficult it was to refer to the relevant circle using an affirmation, the more often negation was produced (e.g. the circle without stripes vs. the circle that looks like shattered glass). Overall, the results of the three studies fit the view that an important communicative function of negation is to correct false assumptions and thereby draw attention to plausible alternatives. However, the production of negation is also modulated by economic considerations. A lot remains to be understood about how negation is processed, but the current results confirm that an investigation of negation processing from a pragmatic perspective seems particularly promising.