Abstract
Negated gradable adjectives often convey an interpretation that is stronger than their literal meaning, which is referred to as ‘negative strengthening.’ For example, a sentence like ‘John is not kind’ may give rise to the inference that John is rather mean. Crucially, negation is more likely to be pragmatically strengthened in the case of positive adjectives (‘not kind’ to mean rather mean) than negative adjectives (‘not mean’ to mean rather kind). A classical explanation of this polarity asymmetry is based on politeness, specifically on the potential face threat of bare negative adjectives (Horn, 1989; Brown and Levinson, 1987). This paper presents the results of two experiments investigating the role of face management in negative strengthening. We show that negative strengthening of positive and negative adjectives interacts differently with the social variables of power, social distance, and gender.
Highlights
The last few years have seen a growing interest in the experimental investigation of the role of social context in language comprehension
The experiment was conducted in accordance with the ethics policy of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) under grant Nos
We found an interaction between polarity and participant gender with female participants displaying a greater degree of negative strengthening for positive compared to negative adjectives
Summary
The last few years have seen a growing interest in the experimental investigation of the role of social context in language comprehension. The seminal paper of Bonnefon et al (2009) opened up the question of the role of face management in the interpretation of utterances containing scalar terms like ‘some.’ Based on a series of experimental studies, Bonnefon and colleagues put forward the claim that the scalar term ‘some’ is less likely to be interpreted as conveying a pragmatically strengthened meaning (some but not all) when the utterance represents a threat to the positive social identity or ‘face’ of the addressee (‘Some people hated your poem’) than when it does not (‘Some people loved your poem’). This paper aims at filling this gap by looking at the interpretation of negated adjectives
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