Explicit Negation Research Articles

Negation and social avoidance in language recruits the right inferior frontal gyrus: a tDCS study.

In the process of comprehension, linguistic negation induces inhibition of negated scenarios. Numerous studies have highlighted the role of the right Inferior Frontal Gyrus (rIFG) - a key component of the inhibitory network - in negation processing. Social avoidance can be linguistically portrayed using attitudinal verbs such as "exclude" vs. "include", which inherently carry negative connotations. Consequently, we hypothesize that the interplay between explicit negation and the implicit negativity of avoidance verbs can be modulated via transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) targeting the rIFG. In our study, sixty-four participants read approach/avoidance sentences, which were either affirmative or negative, such as "Anne included (did not include) meat in her diet" vs. "Anne excluded (did not exclude) meat in her diet". This reading task followed a 20-minute tDCS session. The sentences were sequentially displayed, and at 1500 ms post-sentence, a verb was shown - either the one previously mentioned or its semantic alternative counterpart (e.g., included vs. excluded). Findings revealed that anodal stimulation intensifies the inhibitory impact of negation during sentence comprehension. Under anodal conditions, negative sentences led to extended reading times for the mentioned verbs compared to their affirmative counterparts, suggesting an increased inhibitory effect on the verb. Furthermore, in avoidance sentences, anodal stimulation resulted in reduced reading times for alternative verbs (e.g. "included") in negative sentences compared to alternative verbs (e.g. "excluded") in negated approach sentences. As "avoidance" is semantically equivalent to "non-approach", the inhibitory effect of negation is primarily applied to the implicit negation: NOT EXCLUDED = NOT→NOT (INCLUDED), which consequently activates the representation of the alternative verb making it more available. We further discuss these findings in light of the rIFG's pivotal role in processing attitudinal verbs and linguistic negation. This discussion is framed within the overarching context of the two-step model of negation processing, highlighting its significance in the realm of social communication.

Feature Space Augmentation for Negation Handling on Sentiment Analysis

One crucial issue affecting the performance of sentiment analysis tasks is negation. Handling negation involves determining the negation scope and negation cue. Feature space augmentation is one approach used to address negation. Feature space augmentation has been carried out by some previous researchers using a negation flag with the rule that the negation scope includes all words from the explicit negation cue to the punctuation mark. This study aimed to analyze the classifier's performance when negation handling was applied by adding a new rule for the negation scope. The new rule for determining the negation scope no longer took all words from the negation cue to the punctuation mark, but only considered or ignored words with certain POS tags. The results of this study showed that using the new rule for negation scope contributed to improving the performance of the classifier in sentiment analysis tasks. The proposed approach for negation handling was better than the previous approach in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and f1-score.

Memory effects of implicit and explicit negation in a visual setting: Negation based on implicatures leads to a similar number of false memory alarms as overt negation

Memory effects of implicit and explicit negation in a visual setting: Negation based on implicatures leads to a similar number of false memory alarms as overt negation

The cyclic nature of negation: From implicit to explicit

Abstract The Hebrew negation adverbial bilti ‘not’ seems to function very differently in Biblical Hebrew than it does in Contemporary Hebrew. This paper addresses this difference and discusses its evolution. The main question addressed in this paper is: How has Hebrew bilti, originally an exceptive marker (with sentential scoping), ended up functioning solely as a privative in contemporary Hebrew? First, this paper argues that the biblical usage of bilti was expanded and turned into a polyfunctional (or ‘polysemous’) item. This happened via a constructionalization process which led to grammatical changes (‘grammaticalization’): The initially implicated negation (via a generalized implicature) turned explicit (semantic). In addition, in Hebrew’s later periods, the usage of bilti was narrowed and it became a privative. Thus, firstly, a pragmatically motivated path of constructionalization of bilti in Biblical Hebrew is suggested. That is, the “pragmatic negation” that arose via a generalized implicature shifted to the semantic level (performing semantic negation, explicit negation). Secondly, bilti’s functions in post-biblical Hebrew periods are outlined, tracing its narrowing functions until its fixation in Contemporary Hebrew as a privative.

Syntactic and Semantic Properties of on the Contrary in British University Student Essay Writing: A Corpus-Based Systemic Functional Analysis

In contrast to previous descriptions of on the contrary (OTC) as a corrective or replacive marker requiring explicit negation, this study revealed that more than 50% of the occasions the expression was used in British tertiary level student essays, represented by British academic written English (BAWE) corpus, were not associated with a preceding negation. The frequency information provides a starting point for the qualitative analysis of the two functional types of OTC, i.e., adversative versus replacive. The notions of (topical) theme, rheme, and focus within systemic functional linguistics were proposed as descriptive frameworks to identify the distinct characteristics of each functional type. The replacive type typically employs a preceding negation and a topical theme equal to that of the clause complex preceding the conjunctive, whereas the adversative type is distinguished by the use of a different topical theme and a contrastive rheme. The analysis conducted in this study provided language teachers with a model for helping students comprehend logic semantics expressed by conjunctives by analyzing semantic features of connected clause complexes.

Rejectionist Islamism in sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract This article contributes to a better understanding of the dynamics of Islamist mobilization in sub-Saharan Africa. Since the late 1980s, several African societies have witnessed significant Islamist violence. Against this background, the article provides a typology of rejectionist Islamism, a strain of Islamism that has left a major imprint both on East and West African settings. While rejectionist Islamist groups share as their common denominator the explicit negation of the nation state's legitimacy, they can be differentiated according to whether they violently challenge the state and are willing to participate in mainstream civil society. Thus, in this article I present four different types of rejectionist Islamism: ‘isolationism’, ‘militant isolationism’, ‘participatory rejectionism’ and ‘militant participatory rejectionism’. Examining rejectionist groups from four African countries, I demonstrate my typology's capacity for facilitating a fine-grained assessment of individual group trajectories over time. Finally, I present findings on the determinants of the violent radicalization of rejectionist Islamist groups.

\u201cLooking at\u201d Negation: Faster Processing for Symbolic Rather Than Iconic Representations

Many studies have shown the double processing of negation, suggesting that negation integration into sentence meaning is delayed. This contrasts with some researches that have found that such integration is rather immediate. The present study contributes to this debate. Affirmative and negative compound sentences (e.g., “because he was not hungry, he did not order a salad”) were presented orally in a visual world paradigm while four printed words were on the screen: salad, no salad, soup, and no soup. The eye-tracking data showed two different fixation patterns for negative causal assertions, which are linked to differences in the representation and inferential demands. One indicates that negation is integrated immediately, as people look at the explicit negation (e.g., no salad) very early. The other, in which people look at the alternate (e.g., soup) much later, indicates that what is delayed in time is the representation of the alternate. These results support theories that combine iconic and symbolic representations, such as the model theory.

Default Negation as Explicit Negation plus Update

We argue that under the stable model semantics default negation can be read as explicit negation with update. We show that dynamic logic programming which is based on default negation, even in the heads, can be interpreted in a variant of updates with explicit negation only. As corollaries, we get an easy description of default negation in generalized and normal logic programming where initially negated literals are updated. These results are discussed with respect to the understanding of negation in logic.

L2ers’ comprehension of different types of negation in English NPI licensing: An ERP study

This paper exploits the sensitivity of negative polarity items (NPIs) to negation to inspect the time course of processing different types of negation by Korean English L2ers. The elicitation of N400 in the ERP experiment with the issue at stake in this paper reveals that like L1 speakers, L2ers in online sentence processing can rapidly recognize negative meaning from different sources, say, from asserted, explicit negation (i.e. negation in the yntactic-semantic representation) and non-asserted, implicit negation (i.e. pragmatically inferred negation in the complement of emotive predicates). At the same time, we observe that unlike L1 speakers, Korean English L2ers cannot carry out the second phase of the integration-involving NPI licensing process. The absence of late P600 in the unlicensed and the emotive predicate conditions suggests that unlike L1 speakers, L2ers stop short of terminating grammatical NPI licensing in the face of asserted, explicit negation. Nor can they enter into the analogous second phase of sanctioning NPIs in the face of pragmatically inferred negation.

Effect of Negation in Sentences on Sentiment Analysis and Polarity Detection

Sentiment analysis is one of the sub-domains of Natural Language Processing (NLP) that is of piqued interest in the research community. With the advent of e-commerce and social media, more and more customer opinions are being provided online in the written text form. Nowadays, sentiment analysis provides a way for companies to understand customer opinions towards products and services in a global marketplace. Negative sentences or using negations in sentences have a significant impact on sentiment polarity detection. Inappropriate processing of negations in leads to biases and misclassification of sentiments. In this paper, we provide a novel end-to-end sentiment analysis approach to handle negations, along with the inclusion of negation identification and negation scope marking. Our approach introduces a customized negation marking algorithm for explicit negation detection and perform experiments on sentiment analysis with different machine learning algorithms such as Naïve Bayes, Support Vector Machines, Artificial Neural Network (ANN), and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) on sentiment analysis of Amazon reviews, specifically of cell phones. By evaluating the effect of the negation algorithm on the sentiment analysis tasks, the RNN achieved the best accuracy of 95.67% when combined with our negation marking processing, exceeding its accuracy without any identification of negative sentences. Further, our approach was applied to another dataset of Amazon reviews and demonstrated a significant improvement in the overall accuracy.

Correction of evident falsehood requires explicit negation.

The danger of receiving false information is omnipresent, and people might be highly vigilant against being influenced by falsehoods. Yet, as research on misinformation reveals, people are often biased by false information, even when they know the valid alternative. The question is: why? The current research explores the relative encoding strength of 2 opposing alternatives involved in the correction of falsehood: the false concept and the valid concept. These encoding strengths may be critical for what people remember and how they act upon receiving false information. We compared 2 triggers for the correction of falsehood-a sentence consisting of clearly false information (e.g., honey is made by butterflies) and a sentence consisting of an explicit negation of this information (e.g., honey is not made by butterflies). The general pattern of results from 5 experiments demonstrates that the valid concept (e.g., bees) exhibits a weaker presence in memory than the false concept (e.g., butterflies) following the comprehension of evidently false information as compared to its explicit negation. Thus, the current research provides an answer to the riddle of the persistence of false information: False information is less likely to be mentally corrected if it is not explicitly negated. Even when people detect that a sentence is false, they tend to focus on the false concept rather than on the valid concept. These findings shed new light on extant research and offer fresh insights about the processing of false information and related phenomena such as the reliance on misinformation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The Art of Refusal: Notes on the Poetics of No

This essay proposes an approximation to the different ways in which the visual arts have dealt with versions of the word NO since Marcel Duchamp created his NON in 1959. This form of explicit negation has been explored in different formats and with myriad meanings by artists such as Boris Lurie, Santiago Sierra, Bahia Shehab and Maurizio Cattelan. I examine how their works emphasize political dimensions of refusal, questioning realities and notions that are prevalent in art as well as in other spheres. Their contributions also create new links that develop in severaldirections--associating people, ideas, art and history.

Revisiting Explicit Negation in Answer Set Programming

AbstractA common feature in Answer Set Programming is the use of a second negation, stronger than default negation and sometimes called explicit, strong or classical negation. This explicit negation is normally used in front of atoms, rather than allowing its use as a regular operator. In this paper we consider the arbitrary combination of explicit negation with nested expressions, as those defined by Lifschitz, Tang and Turner. We extend the concept of reduct for this new syntax and then prove that it can be captured by an extension of Equilibrium Logic with this second negation. We study some properties of this variant and compare to the already known combination of Equilibrium Logic with Nelson’s strong negation.

Ideological Diversity and Birth Control Differentials in Pakistan: A Study of Islamabad

Population explosion was not a grave problem in the early days of Islam or in the period of Islamic legislation. Thus, no explicit negation or affirmation of it is available either in the religious texts or in the religious jurisprudence or law. That is why presently the ulema from both the ends  the opponents as well as the proponents of family planning, extract some selective Quranic verses, Ahadith and inferences of jurisprudence in favour of their respective viewpoints. Such diverging views have made the future of family planning programmes doubtful in Pakistan. With this background, the present study shows that in the contemporary situation, it is solely the individual who makes the final decision about approving or disapproving family planning. This decision-making process is influenced by the personal attributes of the practitioners. In order to evaluate these attributes, the researcher has attempted to analyze and highlight the perception of family planning by Muslim residents of Islamabad i.e. the Capital city of Pakistan. The people surveyed are predominantly from different social, geographical and economic backgrounds and from different religious callings, along the sectarian continuum. The researcher’s task has thus been to observe the responses and to point out whether the objective variables i.e. geographical, income and class, occupation and age factors etc. are more significantly associated with knowledge, attitude and practice of family planning or the subjective variables like religion and sect appear to be more important determining factor of family planning practice in a traditional society like that of Pakistan.

There is no item vs. I wish there were an item: Implicit negation causes false recall just as well as explicit negation.

When talking about absence, we may express it in a negative statement (using explicit negation e.g. I was not) or in a positive statement (using implicit negation e.g. I wished I were). Previous research has shown that explicitly negated statements may cause false recall–negated items may paradoxically be remembered as present. The current study compares false recall caused by implicit and explicit negation. Participants listened to a recording in which some objects were mentioned as present, some as absent, and some not mentioned at all. The absence of objects was expressed using explicit or implicit negation. Participants’ recall of the recording was measured either five minutes or one week after exposure to the recording. Results indicate that implicit and explicit negation lead to a nearly identical false recall of negated items. However, items not mentioned in the recording (i.e. neither mentioned nor negated) were more often recognized as present by participants exposed to implicit, rather than explicit negation. We postulate that false recall of negated items could be explained by participants remembering the item itself, but forgetting the context in which it was present (an affirmative or a negative statement), hence objects would be recalled as present just because they were spoken of.

Extending Well-Founded Semantics with Clark’s Completion for Disjunctive Logic Programs

In this paper, we introduce new semantics (that we call D3-WFS-DCOMP) and compare it with the stable semantics (STABLE). For normal programs, this semantics is based onsuitableintegration of the well-founded semantics (WFS) and the Clark’s completion. D3-WFS-DCOM has the following appealing properties: First, it agrees with STABLE in the sense that it never defines a nonminimal model or a nonminimal supported model. Second, for normal programs it extends WFS. Third, every stable model of a disjunctive programPis a D3-WFS-DCOM model ofP. Fourth, it is constructed using transformation rules accepted by STABLE. We also introduce second semantics that we call D2-WFS-DCOMP. We show that D2-WFS-DCOMP is equivalent to D3-WFS-DCOMP for normal programs but this is not the case for disjunctive programs. We also introduce third new semantics that supports the use of implicit disjunctions. We illustrate how these semantics can be extended to programs including explicit negation, default negation in the head of a clause, and aluboperator, which is a generalization of the aggregation operatorsetofover arbitrary complete lattices.

Sorry as a Marker for Self-negation Used by Learners in Language Classrooms

This study analyzes the naturally occurring English word sorry in adult learners' talk in a language classroom and examines its role as a marker for self-negation from the perspective of pragmatic negation. The database for this study consists of 40 hours of video recordings of online tutorials for learning Chinese as a second language at a university in Hong Kong. The detailed analysis shows that to address various types of problematic utterances they make, learners do not always use an explicit negation operator such as no to negate their prior utterances but instead use sorry as an alternative. Rather than being used as a negation of a truth-functional operator for propositions, sorry is prominently used by learners as a device for objecting to a prior utterance in conversational implicature or other aspects of language use related to pragmatic negation. The findings also show that sorry plays a dual role by negating the prior utterance and predicting the next utterance, which may be either by the speaker or by the hearer, for correction. The reason for sorry being used as a marker for negation is discussed, and the study suggests that as sorry is perceived and understood maturely by speakers and hearers in context, it realizes the function of pragmatic negation.

The War Machine as Chronotope: Temporality in Child-Soldier Fiction

This essay considers the child-soldier figure in contemporary African fiction as a vehicle for a critique of modernity as a particular time consciousness and of its attendant geopolitics. In the work of novelists Ahmadou Kourouma, Chris Abani, Abdourahman Waberi, and others, experiments in narrative temporality and an explicit negation of the temporality of Bildung represent the vexed relationship to futurity in those regions of the global South most disadvantaged by the long history of their entanglement with modernity. Yet, in these works, this turning away from the temporality of modernity instantiated in the Bildungsroman is not about turning away from futurity itself. Instead, the child-soldier figure yokes together a critical attention to the historical impediments to African futures with an insistence on the possibility of alternative futures.

A HYBRID APPROACH FOR POLARITY SHIFT DETECTION

Now-a-days sentiment analysis has become a hot research area. With the increasing use of internet, people express their views by using social media, blogs, etc. So there is a dire need to analyze people's opinions. Sentiment classification is the main task of sentiment analysis. But while classifying sentiments, the problem of polarity shift occurs. Polarity shift is considered as a very crucial problem. Polarity shift changes a text from positive to negative and vice versa. In this paper, a hybrid approach is proposed for polarity shift detection of negation (explicit and implicit) and contrast. The hybrid approach consists of a rule-based approach for detecting explicit negation and contrast and a lexicon called SentiWordNet for detecting implicit negation. The proposed approach outperforms its baselines.

China’s New School of Thought-Masters (Xinzixue): An Alternative to Sinologism?

Abstract As is well known, identity studies have always to do with drawing boundaries. In Western sinological works as in the debates of Chinese intellectuals concerning their cultural identity, there are a number of fields which are again and again demarcated against some corresponding fields in other cultures: Chinese philosophy, Chinese literature, Chinese history etc. The practice of drawing boundaries is not limited to the work of the so called cultural relativists. Universalists, who display a critical attitude towards cultural relativism and advocate the equality of cultural phenomena in the world as a matter of principle, construct their argumentation also on the basis of a crucial boundary, i. e. the conception of their own program – their own academic identity – as opposing the program of cultural relativism. The present study defends the idea that any discussion of questions concerning identity constructions, any act of drawing boundaries, as any criticism against drawing them can be interpreted as a political statement and that they become every time problematic when they are accompanied by an explicit negation of politics or when they are not reflected upon as participating in politics. The focus will lie on Chinese readings of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and on current Chinese debates about the issue of national identity.