The Processing of Negation and Polarity: An Overview

Abstract

Negation is a universal component of human language; polarity sensitivity (i.e., lexical distributional constraints in relation to negation) is arguably so while being pervasive across languages. Negation has long been a field of inquiry in psychological theories and experiments of reasoning, which inspired many follow-up studies of negation and negation-related phenomena in psycholinguistics. In generative theoretical linguistics, negation and polarity sensitivity have been extensively studied, as the related phenomena are situated at the interfaces of syntax, semantics and pragmatics, and are thus extremely revealing about the architecture of grammar. With the now long tradition of research on negation and polarity in psychology and psycholinguistics, and the emerging field of experimental semantics and pragmatics, a multitude of interests and experimental paradigms have emerged which call for re-evaluations and further development and integration. This special issue contains a collection of 16 research articles on the processing of negation and negation-related phenomena including polarity items, questions, conditionals, and irony, using a combination of behavioral (e.g., rating, reading, eye-tracking and sentence completion) and neuroimaging techniques (e.g., EEG). They showcase the processing of negation and polarity with or without context, in various languages and across different populations (adults, typically developing and ADHD children). The integration of multiple theoretical and empirical perspectives in this collection provides new insights, methodological advances and directions for future research.

Production of Sentential Negation in German and Italian Non-fluent Aphasia

“…As mentioned in the Introduction, negative sentences have consistently been found to pose more demands on the processing system than affirmative sentences, as negation prolongs processing times (e.g., for a recent review, see Kaup & Dudschig, 2020). This is especially true when negative sentences are presented out of context or with insufficient context (e.g., Albu et al, 2021; for recent reviews, see Dudschig et al, 2021a, andDudschig, 2020), as was the case for the sentence anagram task with pictures used in Rispens et al (2001), Bastiaanse et al (2002), and here (for details, see the "Introduction" section).…”

“…Another limitation of the study relates to the fact that accuracy performance was selected as the dependent variable (aka outcome measure), which presumably is not sensitive enough to the increased processing demands associated with negation (e.g., Albu et al, 2021 ; Dudschig et al, 2021a ; Kaup & Dudschig, 2020 ). It is possible that only when the increased processing demands linked to negation are coupled with additional processing demands associated with language-specific (morpho)syntactic properties of negation does the computational asymmetry between negative and affirmative sentences translate into significantly worse accuracy performance on negative than on affirmative sentences.…”

“…Negation is associated with longer processing times especially when negative sentences are processed out of context or when the context provided is not sufficiently supportive (e.g., Albu et al, 2021 ; Dudschig et al, 2021a ; Kaup & Dudschig, 2020 ). The extent to which the provided context suffices to reduce the processing costs associated with negation is determined by the amount of informativeness in negative sentences given the context (e.g., Xiang et al, 2020 ) and the context-based expectations (e.g., Nordmeyer & Frank, 2014 ; Wason, 1965 ).…”

“…Hence, in the negative polarity condition, participants were always provided with some “legitimizing contexts” for sentential negation. However, one could counter that, given the pictorial contexts provided in the task, negation was not “pragmatically licensed” in terms of informativeness of the target negative sentences (see Dudschig et al, 2021a ) as the negative sentences never provided new information which could not be inferred from the picture, nor was it the most informative option to describe the state of affairs represented in the picture (Xiang et al, 2020 ). Moreover, pictorial contexts were minimal and the negative sentences only served to denote that the meaning representation of the picture did not match the negated proposition in the sentence.…”

Situating language register across the ages, languages, modalities, and cultural aspects: Evidence from complementary methods

“…], and negative polarity items [NPIs, e.g., John wouldn't (lift a finger to) help with the task .]. These phenomena have been approached differently in theoretical linguistic (Horn, 1989 ), psycholinguistic (Dudschig et al, 2021 ), and sociolinguistic research (Labov, 1972 ; Eckert, 1989 ). Taking an integrated approach, we conducted the first set of experiments on negative concord, single negations, and NPIs in American and British English.…”