Negation In Natural Language Research Articles

Dyadic negation in natural language

AbstractIn order to provide for a linguistically and cognitively sound theory of negation, we argue for the introduction of a dyadic negation predicate lack and a force dynamic account of affirmation and negation in general.

Composing Conversational Negation

Negation in natural language does not follow Boolean logic and is therefore inherently difficult to model. In particular, it takes into account the broader understanding of what is being negated. In previous work, we proposed a framework for the negation of words that accounts for 'worldly context'. This paper extends that proposal now accounting for the compositional structure inherent in language within the DisCoCirc framework. We compose the negations of single words to capture the negation of sentences. We also describe how to model the negation of words whose meanings evolve in the text.

Negator turned intersubjective speech-act adverbial

AbstractThis study investigates the non-negating negatorm̄in Taiwanese. With respect to its function, this study argues that it is neither an intensifier nor a rhetorical marker. Furthermore, contrary to prevalent intuition, the combinationm̄-tōis not parallel to the ostensible cognatebújiùin Mandarin Chinese. Instead, the non-negatingm̄is an intersubjective speech-act adverbial affix attaching to the head of FocP (realized astōortsiah) that takes scope over whatever follows. Typologically, this study uncovers another use of non-negating negation in natural languages, and consequently challenges the enterprise pursuing a unified analysis for the phenomena of the so-called expletive negation.

Семантика для гиперклассической логики и проблема отрицания в формальном языке

The application of game-theoretic semantics for first-order logic is based on a certain kind of semantic assumptions, directly related to the asymmetry of the definition of truth and lies as the winning strategies of the Verifier (Abelard) and the Counterfeiter (Eloise). This asymmetry becomes apparent when applying GTS to IFL. The legitimacy of applying GTS when it is transferred to IFL is based on the adequacy of GTS for FOL. But this circumstance is not a reason to believe that one can hope for the same adequacy in the case of IFL. Then the question arises if GTS is a natural semantics for IFL. Apparently, the intuitive understanding of negation in natural language can be explicated in formal languages in various ways, and the result of an incomplete grasp of the concept in these languages can be considered a certain kind of anomalies, in view of the apparent simplicity of the explicated concept. Comparison of the theoretical-model and game theoretic semantics in application to two kinds of language – the first-order language and friendly-independent logic – allows to discover the causes of the anomaly and outline ways to overcome it.

Upper bounded and un-bounded ‘no more’

Constituent negation (CN) is commonly thought to be a subtype of natural language negation which does not exhibit substantial differences from the more frequent verbal negation. In this paper, I argue that at least Czech CN is different. I argue that its semantics targets both at-issue meaning and focus alternatives. The evidence will come from differences in interpretations between English and Czech with respect to negated comparatives adjoined to NPs (like no more than two people) and from many other types of negated constituents. I argue that the cross-linguistic variation can be explained if Slavic CN is treated as a focus-oriented particle, unlike English no which targets scalar alternatives.

Description versus rejection in the analysis of negation: Evidence from Romanian and English

Found at the interface between cognition, language and logic, this paper discusses the mental representation of negation in natural language. Following the framework provided by Relevance Theory, it suggests that different types of negation represent actualizations of either the descriptive or the metarepresentational use. An account of descriptive negation and metarepresentational negation is offered based on the logical, semantic and pragmatic relations between the negative utterance and its formal affirmative correspondent, on the one hand, and semantic affirmative correspondent, on the other. Metarepresentational negation is defined as the rejection of a formal affirmative correspondent, always an instance of a second-order interpretation while descriptive negation represents the assertion of a negative content in the form of a semantic affirmative correspondent, always an instance of a first-order interpretation. This investigation is supported by a large corpus analysis represented by authentic Romanian and English data.

Diachronic Developments in the Domain of Negation

AbstractThis overview article discusses several important diachronic developments in the domain of negation. Every natural language has some device at its disposal to express that the truth‐value of the propositional contents of a sentence is reversed. Languages vary not only synchronically with respect to the way they express negation but also diachronically. However, languages do not undergo arbitrary changes in the domain of negation but rather follow particular diachronic pathways that leave little room for language‐specific variation. Consequently, the study of these diachronic developments may shed more light on the nature of negation in natural language than synchronic studies already do. Why is it that negation may only change along particular pathways and what does this tell us about the (special) status of negation as a functional category? This article aims to pave the way for everybody interested in the answers to these questions. I provide a brief overview of the major diachronic developments in the domain of negation that have been discovered thus far and the explanations that have been provided for these patterns. I also discuss some of the consequences of the existence of these attested patterns.

On the negativity of negation

Natural language negation is persistently negative in the pragmatic sense, and emphatic and attenuating negative polarity items modulate this effect in systematic ways. I use large corpora of informal texts with meta-data approximating features of the context to characterize this pragmatic negativity, and I attempt to explain it in terms of the ways in which negative sentences engage the questions under discussion. The discussion highlights some of the ways in which quantitative corpus methods can be used to achieve novel results in linguistic pragmatics.

Logico-cognitive structure in the lexicon

This study is a prolegomenon to a formal theory of the natural growth of conceptual and lexical fields. Negation, in the various forms in which it occurs in language, is found to be a powerful indicator. Other than in standard logic, natural language negation selects its complement within universes of discourse that are, for practical and functional reasons, restricted in various ways and to different degrees. It is hypothesized that a system of cognitive principles drives recursive processes of universe restriction, which in turn affects logical relations within the restricted universes. This approach provides a new perspective in which to view the well-known clashes between standard logic and natural logical intuitions. Lexicalization in language, especially the morphological incorporation of negation, is limited to highly restricted universes, which explains, for example, why a dog can be said not to be a Catholic, but also not to be a non-Catholic. Cognition is taken to restrict the universe of discourse to contrary pairs, splitting up one or both of the contraries into further subuniverses as a result of further cognitive activity. It is shown how a logically sound square of opposition , expanded to a hexagon (Jacoby 1950, 1960, Sesmat 1951, Blanche 1952, 1953, 1966), is generated by a hierarchy of universe restrictions, defining the notion ‘natural’ for logical systems. The logical hexagon contains two additional vertices, one for ‘some but not all’ (the Y-type) and one for ‘either all or none’ (the U-type), and incorporates both the classic square and the Hamiltonian triangle of contraries . Some is thus considered semantically ambiguous, representing two distinct quantifiers. The pragmaticist claim that the language system contains only the standard logical ‘some perhaps all’ and that the ‘some but not all’ meaning is pragmatically derived from the use of the system is rejected. Four principles are proposed according to which negation selects a complement from the subuniverses at hand. On the basis of these principles and of the logico-cognitive system proposed, the well-known nonlexicalization not only of *nall and *nand but also of many other nonlogical cases found throughout the lexicons of languages is analyzed and explained.

On the negativity of negation

Natural language negation is persistently negative in the pragmatic sense, and emphatic and attenuating negative polarity items modulate this effect in systematic ways. I use large corpora of informal texts with meta-data approximating features of the context to characterize this pragmatic negativity, and I attempt to explain it in terms of the ways in which negative sentences engage the questions under discussion. The discussion highlights some of the ways in which quantitative corpus methods can be used to achieve novel results in linguistic pragmatics.

Negation and the creation of implicit meaning in poetry

Creating meaning through the use of negation is a cooperative process between speaker and hearer or writer and reader; at surface level, negation acts as an instruction that a proposition should be understood as an unrealized state, event or existence. However, this unrealized state of affairs appears to add no positive information to an ongoing discourse, and approaches based on an analysis of formal semantics and predicate logic are limited in their ability to account for how negated propositions are meaningful in discourse. A reader must infer the intended relevant meaning of a negated proposition based on the assumption that it functions explicitly to deny its opposite, positive counterpart. Further, in order to understand a negated proposition we must be able to conceptualize the positive proposition that is being denied, and this concept, though understood as an unrealized state of affairs, adds to the ongoing discourse both as a concept and as an expectation. A cognitive approach to the analysis of negation in natural language provides the tools to examine how readers and writers cooperate to make meaning. In this article, I use a cognitive stylistic approach, Text World Theory (Werth, 1999), as a framework in my analysis of a small selection of poems, 'The Tyre' (Simon Armitage), 'The Listeners' (Walter de la Mare) and 'Talking in Bed' (Philip Larkin) to explore how negation, as a pragmatic phenomenon, creates unrealized worlds, which far from being discarded are integral to the construction of meaning and effect.

Negation in Natural Language: On the Form and Meaning of Negative Elements

AbstractA universal property of natural language is that every language is able to express negation. Every language has some device at its disposal to reverse the truth value of a certain sentence. However, languages may differ to quite a large extent as to how they express this negation. Not only do languages vary with respect to the position of negative elements, also the form of negative elements and the interpretation of sentences that consist of multiple negative elements are subject to broad cross‐linguistic variation. The study to the behaviour of sentential negation has therefore strongly been guided by the question as to what determines the possible ways that sentential negation can manifest itself. A conclusion of the article will be that the behaviour of negation in natural language strongly deviates from what intuitively might be expected.

Unnaturalness of Negation – an Old Wives’ Tale Retold

Negation has a very long history of study. In the realm of logic, negation is seen as a simple operation that turns an affirmative to a negative. This assumption strongly affected the linguistic study of negation, and led to some misconceptions. For example, negation in natural languages is seen as something unnatural, artificial and syntactically as well as semantically dependant on affirmation. It is perceived as a logical/mathematical operation that turns affirmatives into negatives by way of syntactic transformation and semantic cancellation of multiple negatives. To refute some of these misconceptions, the paper investigates the nature of negation as a linguistic phenomenon, and shows that negation in logic and linguistics should not and cannot be treated in the same fashion. Special attention is paid to the problems of structural complexity, the syntactic notion of multiple negation and its different semantic interpretations. With regard to the semantic interpretation of multiple negation, languages, by and large, allow for two possibilities: negative concord and double negation. Negative concord, which interprets two negatives as a single negation, seems to represent the natural course of language development, while double negation, which allows the cancellation of two negatives resulting in affirmation, was introduced into languages under the influence of logic in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Understanding ‘not’: neuropsychological dissociations between hand and head markers of negation in BSL

Simple negation in natural languages represents a complex interrelationship of syntax, prosody, semantics and pragmatics, and may be realised in various ways: lexically, morphologically and prosodically. In almost all spoken languages, the first two of these are the primary realisations of syntactic negation. In contrast, in many signed languages negation can occur without lexical or morphological marking. Thus, in British Sign Language (BSL), negation is obligatorily expressed using face–head actions alone (facial negation) with the option of articulating a manual form alongside the required face–head actions (lexical negation). What are the processes underlying facial negation? Here, we explore this question neuropsychologically. If facial negation reflects lexico-syntactic processing in BSL, it may be relatively spared in people with unilateral right hemisphere (RH) lesions, as has been suggested for other ‘grammatical facial actions’ [Language and Speech 42 (1999) 307; Emmorey, K. (2002). Language, cognition and the brain: Insights from sign language research. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum (Lawrence)]. Three BSL users with RH lesions were specifically impaired in perceiving facial compared with manual (lexical and morphological) negation. This dissociation was absent in three users of BSL with left hemisphere lesions and different degrees of language disorder, who also showed relative sparing of negation comprehension. We conclude that, in contrast to some analyses [Applied Psycholinguistics 18 (1997) 411; Emmorey, K. (2002). Language, cognition and the brain: Insights from sign language research. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum (Lawrence); Archives of Neurology 36 (1979) 837], non-manual negation in sign may not be a direct surface realisation of syntax [Language and Speech 42 (1999) 143; Language and Speech 42 (1999) 127]. Difficulties with facial negation in the RH-lesion group were associated with specific impairments in processing facial images, including facial expressions. However, they did not reflect generalised ‘face-blindness’, since the reading of (English) speech patterns from faces was spared in this group. We propose that some aspects of the linguistic analysis of sign language are achieved by prosodic analysis systems (analysis of face and head gestures), which are lateralised to the minor hemisphere.

A Quantifier Approach to Negation in Natural Languages

This article attempts to give a uniform and coherent analysis of the semantics and syntax of negation, with special emphasis on negative concord (NC) constructions. It is argued that negation is semantically a tripartite quantifier binding the event variable in its restriction. In syntax, this logical form corresponds to a structure where a NegP is present with Neg ° (normally) hosting the negative particle and a specifier as a checking position in the Minimalist sense. As a consequence, negative indefinites are held to be weak indefinites with a formal feature NEG which has to be checked away (thus obtaining Neg absorption). Additionally, some new data are introduced showing that even English style negative indefinites are analysable as non-negated weak indefinites.

Reasoning with Intensional Negative Adjectivals: Semantics, Pragmatics, and Context

Intensional negative adjectives alleged, artificial, fake, false, former, and toyare unusual adjectives that depending on context may or may not be restricting functions. A formal theory of their semantics, pragmatics, and context that uniformly accounts for their complex mathematical and computational characteristics and captures some peculiarities of individual adjectives is presented.Such adjectives are formalized as new concept builders, negation‐like functions that operate on the values of intensional properties of the concepts denoted by their arguments and yield new concepts whose intensional properties have values consistent with the negation of the old values. Understanding these new concepts involves semantics, pragmatics and context‐dependency of natural language. It is argued that intensional negative adjectives can be viewed as a special‐purpose, weaker, conntext‐dependent negationin natural language. The theory explains and predicts many inferences licensed by expressions involving such adjectives. Implementation of sample examples demonstrates its computational feasibility. Computation of context‐dependent interpretation is discussed.The theory allows one to enhance a knowledge representation system with similar concept building, negation‐like, context‐dependent functions, the availability of which appears to be a distinct characteristic of natural languages.

'Only' noun phrases, pseudo-negative generalized quantifiers, negative polarity items, and monotonicity

The theory of Generalized Quantifiers has facilitated progress in the study of negation in natural language. In particular it has permitted the formulation of a DeMorgan taxonomy of logical strength of negative Noun Phrases (Zwarts 1996a,b). It has permitted the formulation of broad semantical generalizations to explain grammatical phenomena, e.g. the distribution of Negative Polarity Items (Ladusaw 1980 ; Linebarger 1981, 1987, 1991; Hoeksema 1986, 1995; Zwarts 1996a,b ; Horn 1992, 1996b). In the midst of this theorizing Jaap Hoepelman invited me to lecture in Stuttgart about Focus, and I took the opportunity to talk about a seminal paper on 'only Proper Name' and 'even Proper Name' by Larry Horn (1969), a paper that I had admired but that had nagged at me for years. The result of Hoepelman's invitation was Atlas (1991, 1993), in which I believed that I had discerned difficulties for the formal semantics of Negative Polarity Item sentences; 'only Proper Name' sentences licensed Zwarts's weak Negative Polarity Items, e.g. 'ever', 'any', but 'only Proper Name' was not a downwards monotonic quantifier, thus refuting the broad semantical generalization that any NPI licenser was a downward monotonic quantifier. In fact 'only Proper Name' was the first of a new category of generalized quantifier: the pseudo-anti-additive quantifier. Though I have explained and defended the introduction of this new category in this paper, a particular interest of my analysis is that it opens up the theory of Negative Polarity Items for further development; it permits the formulation of entirely new questions for research (see 'Open Questions', Appendix I). Along the way I was also trying to present a correct account of the formal semantics and implicatures of 'only a is F', a subject of theoretical investigation for the last 700 years, but without, in my view, any theory ever arriving at the truth. There had to be something wrong with our theoretical methods or theoretical bias towards

Resolving apparent contradictions: adults' and preschoolers' ability to cope with non-classical negation

ABSTRACTIf the logic of natural language negation were classical – a simple matter of true and false – then it would be a disaster to answer a question likeIs this essay good?withYes and no. The overwhelming majority of adults (N= 40) asked to resolve this apparent contradiction were found to do so by appealing to the structure of the essay (e.g.Its thesis was good but its argument was not). Three-year-olds (N= 24), when suitably prepared, also appealed to object structure to resolve a similar apparent contradiction. These results are discussed in relation to a non-classical logical model that can handle object structure.

But and Negation

Many languages (e.g. Spanish, German, and Swedish) have more than one morpheme corresponding to the English “but”. It has been argued by Anscombre & Ducrot (1977) and by Horn (1989) that two of these morphemes covary with two different functions of natural language negation. Anscombre's and Ducrot's descriptions of these BUTs are examined, and it is shown that there is no such link. There is, however, an interesting connection between “but” and negation. One of the two morphemes imposes a restriction on the use of negation in the clause that follows it, which suggests that natural language negation does not correspond to a truth function.

The Non-Boolean Logic of Natural Language Negation

The Non-Boolean Logic of Natural Language Negation