Volume 5, Issue 4

There has been a substantial amount of research that has examined how context affects people's understanding of negation. Many authors argue that negation is more plausible or natural in some contexts than in others. For these authors, it is reasonable to negate a proposition only when it is presupposed. However, this assumption has been indirectly inferred from comprehension studies. None of them checked if the frequency of the spontaneous use of negation depends on the context. In this paper we present two experiments on this topic. The participants read stories where a sentence is false; and were asked to produce a sentence that could be true. In the first experiment they produced more negations from multiple than from bipolar contexts (e.g., when the false sentence was “ the car was red ” as compared to “ the car was big ”). In the second experiment the context was logically dichotomized by adding disjunctions. In this case, incongruent contexts enhanced the use of negation. The results seem to support the idea that when there is a clear alternative, negation is seldom spontaneously produced even if it denies a presupposition.

We investigated whether readers with high-functioning autism or Asperger's syndrome (HA/AS) differ from normal controls with respect to pragmatic aspects of negation processing. We presented short stories to two groups of readers, a group of individuals diagnosed with HA/AS and a group of normal controls. The final sentence of each story either affirmed or negated a particular proposition, which in the pragmatically felicitous context corresponded to a highly plausible assumption for the situation at hand, but in the pragmatically infelicitous context to an implausible assumption. In line with our predictions, the group of healthy controls read the negative but not the affirmative target sentences more slowly in the pragmatically infelicitous than in the pragmatically felicitous contexts. In the pragmatically felicitous context, reading times for negative sentences were as fast as those for affirmative sentences. In contrast, for the clinical group, the context had no effect: Reading times for the negative target sentences were longer than those of the affirmative target sentences in both context versions. These results indicate that individuals with HA/AS indeed differ from normal controls with respect to negation processing. Moreover, these results are in line with the more general hypothesis that the differences between normal individuals and those with HA/AS concern pragmatic aspects of language processing.

In two experiments conducted in French, we investigated the representation of negated constituents, focusing on their accessibility as antecedents for pronouns. Since only highly accessible discourse entities can serve as antecedents for simple pronouns, pronoun resolution preferences can reflect the degree of accessibility. In our first experiment, we analyzed fixation patterns of participants listening to sentence pairs like “I baked muffins not waffles last night. They will be eaten for breakfast/bought for breakfast”. Fixation patterns on four visually presented objects (the negated, the non-negated, a semantically related and an unrelated object) show that negated constituents were less accessible than non-negated ones, but by no means suppressed, since they were fixated reliably more often than both related and unrelated objects. In the second experiment, a self-paced reading experiment, we were able to show that the accessibility of a negated antecedent depends on the particular way it has been negated. Comparing ordinary negations and repair-like constructions (muffins, no, waffles), we found that anaphoric reference to the negated constituent takes less time when it is at the same time the more recent referent than when it is the more distant one in a repair like construction.

Across three experiments, we studied whether the mental representations of negated concepts are suppressed. In two reading-time experiments, we tested whether the presence of a negated nonreferent distractor (e.g., Justin bought a mango but not an apple. He ate the fruit. ) interfered with the process of anaphor resolution. We found evidence that highly-typical category exemplars (e.g., apple ) in the negated nonreferent role interfere with anaphor comprehension; evidence regarding less-typical category exemplars was mixed. In a third experiment, participants read brief passages like those from the prior experiments and their memory for the category exemplars was tested in a surprise cued-recall task. Once again, we found evidence that negated nonreferents are considered during anaphor resolution. These results are inconsistent with a theoretical perspective that posits that negation of a concept obligatorily leads to suppression of that concept. Instead, we argue that the comprehension of negation will be dictated by its pragmatic role.

Results from 3 experiments argue in favor of the view that, when relevant to contextual information, negated concepts are retained rather than suppressed (Giora 2006, 2007; Giora et al. 2007). It is this retainability of negated information that allows for negated comparisons to come across as similarly appropriate as their affirmative counterparts (Experiment 1), and be as similarly sensitive to degree of prototypicality, as found earlier for affirmative statements (Experiments 2–3); it is also this retainability of negated information that accounts for the readings times of targets involving a prototypical property of the negated source, which were speedier than those involving a less prototypical one (Experiment 3).

The study investigates the way people use and make sense of negated adjectives. Past research showed that by using a negated adjective, instead of an available antonym, one is able to communicate a mitigated sense of that antonym. To illustrate, by saying ‘ not hot ’ one can communicate ‘ neither hot, but not quite cold ’. This effect has been termed the mitigation hypothesis . Our theoretical analysis suggests that the extent of mitigation should vary as a function of two factors. First, mitigation should be more pronounced for contraries (adjectives that lie on a continuum) than for contradictories (adjectives that form a dichotomy); Second, the extent of meaning mitigation of marked adjectives should be stronger than that of unmarked adjectives. Finally, we hypothesized that these two factors interact, so that the markedness effect should be stronger for contraries than for contradictories. We report results from three experiments that tested these hypotheses with native speakers of Hebrew and discuss alternative mechanisms that might lead to mitigation of negated terms. We also address the practical importance of our findings for questionnaire design and communication.