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Dynamic Pragmatic View of Negation Processing

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Negation and Polarity: Experimental Perspectives

Part of the book series: Language, Cognition, and Mind ((LCAM,volume 1))

Abstract

Many psycholinguistic studies have found that processing negative sentences is difficult, and often involves the representation of the positive argument. Current rejection accounts suggest that processing the positive argument is the mandatory first step of negation processing, and the difficulty of negation comes from the extra step of embedding. We argue for a dynamic pragmatic view, suggesting that even when processing a sentence without context, comprehenders retrieve contextual information such as its Question Under Discussion (QUD), using linguistic cues. Without supporting context, negation acts as a cue for retrieving and accommodating the most prominent QUD, where the truth of the positive counterpart is at issue. QUD accommodation happens incrementally and automatically, which triggers the representation of the positive argument and contributes to the extra processing cost related to negation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Can negation triggered QUD accommodation be unified with prosodic focus triggered QUD accommodation? Hedberg and Sosa (2003) studied the intonation of negative sentences, and found that the negative morpheme or auxiliary is almost always marked with a high pitch accent, except when negation is contracted with the auxiliary “do”. Therefore, when “don’t” doesn’t receive a high pitch accent and no other constituent is focused, negation must act as a QUD cue itself. Note that in this example, if either “the door” or “open” are focused, the prominent QUD changes. For example, if “the door” is focused, the prominent QUD becomes “What isn’t open?”.

  2. 2.

    Here we restrict our attention to propositions with sentential negation. Negative imperatives (e.g. “Don’t enter this room”), negative questions (e.g. “Are you not coming to the party”), sentences with implicit negation (“It is unimportant”) or embedded negation (“It’s John who didn’t come”) should have different effects on context update. Some of these may require a context where the positive alternative is relevant (e.g. “It is unimportant” > whether it is important is relevant; “Don’t enter this room” > the outcome of entering this room is relevant).

  3. 3.

    Note that in natural language use, a simple negative sentence like “x is not y” can have other QUDs, depending on the constituent in focus, such as “which is not y”, or “x is not what?”. We argue that without context, participants accommodate the most likely QUD for this construction, which is “whether x is y”.

  4. 4.

    To control for the potential typicality effects of the images, we ran a follow-up study using the same items, but replaced all the negative sentences with affirmative ones (fillers are adjusted accordingly to balance polarity and clefting). The results show no significant interaction between match and clefting, nor any main effect of clefting. Instead, match images have faster response to mismatch images. Thus we conclude that there is no inherent difficulty in recognizing either type of image.

  5. 5.

    Here we assume verification is easier than falsification. However the reason is unclear. In fact, we found that in an overt string comparison task, identifying a match is not in general easier than identifying a mismatch (Tian 2014). However, in a sentence-picture verification task, it could be that when sentences are processed first, the representation of the sentence primes the image that makes the sentence true. When pictures are processed first, it facilitates the processing of a true sentence also by priming its representation.

  6. 6.

    Drawing this inference also requires learning and expecting both mentioned items to be in the display, and that one is positioned above the other. This information tended to be giving in the instructions in previous studies, and participants were exposed to pictures like this in practice. However, it is likely that drawing an inference for sentences containing such “context-dependent” binary predicates is more difficult than for sentences with natural binary predicates, such as “The door isn’t open”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université Paris Diderot, Paris, France

    Ye Tian

  2. University College London, London, UK

    Richard Breheny

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  1. Ye Tian
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Correspondence to Ye Tian .

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  1. Département des Sciences du Langage, University of Caen Lower Normandy, Caen, France

    Pierre Larrivée

  2. #308 Bldg 150, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea (Republic of)

    Chungmin Lee

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Tian, Y., Breheny, R. (2016). Dynamic Pragmatic View of Negation Processing. In: Larrivée, P., Lee, C. (eds) Negation and Polarity: Experimental Perspectives. Language, Cognition, and Mind, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17464-8_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17464-8_2

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