Negative Sentences Research Articles

Non-local syntactic interactions across an NP/DP boundary: Negative concord and wh-movement

The paper reports the results of a syntactic experiment which was aimed at comparing locality conditions imposed on two well-known longdistance syntactic processes: intra-clausal negative concord (licensing of negative pronouns by sentential negation) and wh-movement in matrix constituent questions (placement of interrogative pronouns at the beginning of the clause). Since only the latter non-local interaction nearly always results in overt displacement (while negative pronouns may remain in their base position upon agreeing with the Neg0 head), we hypothesized that sentences exemplifying negative concord should receive higher scores than sentences with wh-movement. Two structural configurations were investigated: the negative pronoun or the interrogative pronoun was (i) either (the head of) the direct object of the verb, (ii) or it was embedded inside a nominal (NP/DP). In addition to sentences with negative concord and wh-movement, our materials also included those without any such long-distance interactions. Thus, we asked 60 native speakers of Russian to judge such sentences (as well as some fillers) on a 7-point Likert scale. The results, somewhat surprisingly, did not bear out our expectations. Encapsulating the Goal of an Agree relationship inside a nominal does not lead to a significant change in mean scores (except for sentences with negative concord), while there is a statistically significant difference between sentences with negative concord on the one hand and other types of sentences (those containing wh-movement and those without any non-local dependencies) on the other. Such a stark contrast between negative concord and wh-movement casts doubt on approaches trying to assimilate them (and eventually aiming to reduce negative concord to Aʹ-movement of negative pronouns to their licensor).

Negative Communication on The Perspective of Indonesian Religion Ministry in Tafsir Tematik Departemen Agama: An Effort to Build Positive Attitudes and Words

Many people miss understanding more deeply that Koran only talks about the lawful and unlawful, the reward for sin, and heaven and hell. The Koran is a holy book that presents various general descriptions of issues in human life. In the present context, the Quran can always adapt itself, its understanding is not only limited to 1500 years ago, and the sentences in it are so rich in messages. The wealth of Quranic sentences are strung together in many existing commentary books. One of the thematic studies of the Koran is about communication and information in the Koran. Overall, the Quran is the book of God's communication with his creatures, in which it contains the creator's “talk” to humans to listen, respond, and carry out orders, human understanding of this form of Quranic communication will lead to many positive actions. One thing that may be overlooked is that positive actions do not always come from positive sentences, there are passages in the Quran which in their communications present negative sentences to turn them into positive actions. This research is a qualitative study using a text analysis approach, the main source obtained in this study comes from the thematic interpretations written by the team of the Republic of Indonesia's Department of Religion. The conclusion of this study found several verses with negative nuances mentioned in the Quran so that humans remember and stay away from them.

КРИТЕРІЇ НАПИСАННЯ ТА АНАЛІЗ ЛІНГВІСТИЧНИХ ОСОБЛИВОСТЕЙ CONFERENCE ABSTRACTS У РОЗВИТКУ НАВИЧОК АКАДЕМІЧНОГО ПИСЬМА (НА МАТЕРІАЛІ АНГЛОМОВНИХ ТЕЗ ДОПОВІДЕЙ ДЛЯ НАУКОВИХ КОНФЕРЕНЦІЙ)

The article examines not only the issue of determining the list of criteria for successful writing of conference abstracts, but also views the ability to carry out a linguistic analysis of conference abstracts to ensure the development of academic writing skills. It outlines the meaning of key concepts, abstracts, and conference abstracts, known as secondary genres of scientific discourse. The article describes textual characteristics and application of rhetorical strategies in writing effective conference abstracts. The methods of content analysis and systematization have been used to determine linguistic features of the analyzed conference abstracts. Moreover, it claims on the importance of considering the established conventions of their meaningful writing not only for post-graduate students but for young scholars as well, since it is a common problem for all groups. Failing to meet the requirements, conference abstracts are to be denied by the committee board hosting the future scientific conference. Addressing this problem, experts of blind viewing suggest that it may be attributed to poor command of English, lack of knowledge of academic writing skills and of lexical and stylistic features. The results suggest that familiarizing students with the recent scientific data and methodology is crucial but not sufficient to develop their academic writing skills. Implementing the method of content analysis, the study places emphasis on examining various authentic scientific texts. Thus, the conclusion has been made about the significance of following the accepted format of writing conference abstracts and maintaining appropriate rhetoric strategies in the development of academic writing skills. Among the analyzed materials of the English-language conference abstracts, the most typical linguistic characteristics of this type of genre of academic writing were established: the use of Active Voice constructions, mainly verbs of the present indefinite tense, impersonal constructions, personal, possessive, and indicative pronouns in plural form which act as the subject, abbreviations and negative sentences are rarely used.

The expression of constituent negation in Udmurt: From scope-ambiguous to scope-transparent constructions

AbstractThe study claims that contemporary Udmurt has two main strategies for expressing a ‘constituent negation reading’. Standard Udmurt makes use of inverse-scope constructions involving sentential negation, i.e. a morphosyntactically negated predicate and a pragmatic focus in the scope of negation. The other strategy involves the negator ńe borrowed from Russian, which immediately precedes the negated constituent and combines with a predicate in the affirmative form. Ńe-constructions are analysed as instances of focus negation, with a FocP dominated by a right-branching NegP. The evolution of transparent-scope constructions and of a head-initial NegP are analysed as concomitants of the SOV-to-SVO change of Udmurt.

Sentiment spin: Attacking financial sentiment with GPT-3

In this study, we explore the susceptibility of financial sentiment analysis to adversarial attacks that manipulate financial texts. With the rise of AI readership in the financial sector, companies are adapting their language and disclosures to fit AI processing better, leading to concerns about the potential for manipulation. In the finance literature, keyword-based methods, such as dictionaries, are still widely used for financial sentiment analysis due to their perceived transparency. However, our research demonstrates the vulnerability of keyword-based approaches by successfully generating adversarial attacks using the sophisticated transformer model, GPT-3. With a success rate of nearly 99% for negative sentences in the Financial Phrase Bank, a widely used database for financial sentiment analysis, we highlight the importance of incorporating robust methods, such as context-aware approaches such as BERT, in financial sentiment analysis.

A Parallel Corpus Based Contrastive Study on Negation in Korean and Indonesian Languages

The current research aims to uncover the similarities and differences between Korean ‘an (안)’ and ‘-ji anhta (-지 않다)’, and Indonesian ‘tidak’ and ‘belum’, as well as to formulate their characteristics. This research is an applied contrastive study and the data are derived from the Korean-Indonesian parallel corpus made from Korean drama subtitles. Based on the results, the first prominent findings show that ‘an’ and ‘-ji anhta’, and ‘tidak’ and ‘belum’ are equivalent in regards to their usage as negative markers in negative sentences, thus indicating that they correspond to each other. The findings show that among 1,104 data of Korean negative utterances, only 770 data (69.75%) are translated into Indonesian negative utterances, and 334 data (30.25%) are translated into affirmative utterances by applying alternative translation strategies. The second prominent findings reveal that they are non-equivalent due to the shifts that happen, thus showing that they do not correspond to each other. There are three types of shifts causing the non-equivalence, namely (1) shift from negative verbal into negative nominal forms (32 data, 0.90%), (2) shift from negative declarative into negative imperative forms (36 data, 3.26%), and (3) shift from negative into affirmative forms (334 data, 30.25%). In general, the shifts occur in the subtitle translation because Korean and Indonesian languages belong to different categories in terms of language family and have different ways to express negative meanings.

Affirmative and Negative Sentence Detection in the Brain Using SVM-RFE and Rotation Forest: An fMRI Study

Affirmative and Negative Sentence Detection in the Brain Using SVM-RFE and Rotation Forest: An fMRI Study

Does negation influence the choice of sentence continuations? Evidence from a four-choice cloze task.

Event plausibility facilitates the processing of affirmative sentences, but little is known about how it affects negative sentences. In six behavioural experiments, we investigated negation's impact on the choice of sentence continuations that differ with respect to event plausibility. In a four-choice cloze task, participants saw affirmative and negative sentence fragments (The child will [not] eat the . . .) in combination with four potential continuations: yoghurt (a plausible word), shellfish (a weak world knowledge violating word), branch (a severe world knowledge violating word), and minivan (a word resulting in a semantic violation). Across all experiments the plausible word was highly preferred in both affirmative and negative sentences. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 while ruling out the possibility that the lack of effect of negation in Experiment 1 stemmed from participants not fully processing the negation. Experiment 3 showed that the observed plausibility effects can be generalised to other aspectual forms (The child has [not] eaten the yoghurt). Experiment 4 ruled out the possibility that the choices were mainly driven by lexical associations and additionally suggested a role for informativity. Experiment 5 replicated Experiment 4 and reinforced the general pattern according to which negative sentences express the denial of plausible positive events. Experiment 6 provided evidence that informativity might be driving patterns of choices in the negative sentences. All in all, these findings suggest that upcoming continuations are chosen to maximise the plausibility of the event in the affirmative sentences and to deny that event in the negative sentences. The observed plausibility effects do not seem to be modulated by the internal representation of events, but they can be modulated by changes to the expected informativity of the sentence.

Teaching English Language through Short Story

Literature has a number of interesting genres. The short story is one of them. We know that language items including grammatical items must not be taught to students out of context. They should be taught to them effectively only when they are presented in context. A short story is very rich in language items. There language items are : Verb Patterns, synonyms, connotative and denotative meanings, the use of Prepositions, articles, type of sentences : Simple, Complex, Compound, Assertive, Interrogative, Imperative, Optative, Exclamatory, different types of phrases and clauses and their function, Negative sentences, voice change, narrative change, phrasal verb, idioms & idiomatic expression, collocation, hyponyms, meronyms, transformations. Literature plays an important role in teaching four basic language skills like listening skill, speaking skill, reading skill and Writing skill. However, when teaching language using literature in the classroom, skills should be taught in an integrated way. The short story is no doubt, a very fascinating and mindboggling genres. We read a short story for pleasure and entertainment and for comprehension. A short story consists of a variety of important components e.g. theme, plot structure, plot, climax, epiphany, humour, irony, figure of speech or tropes, stylistic devices, flashback, point of view, etc. The student must have a good knowledge about those ingredients of a short story. There is a wide potpourri of activities which students have to master in order to appreciate a short story. They must know the setting and background of a short story. The setting determines the tone of a short story. The tone may be happy, sad or the tone may reflect a blend of joy and sorrow. The setting refers to the time and place of the short story. There is no short story without a conflict. Conflict may be external or internal. External conflict is between man and man, man and nature, whereas internal conflict remains in a character. A character exhibits internal conflict when she or he remains in a dilemma. Character portrayal is an important aspect of a short story. A character can be dynamic or flat. A dynamic character is one who undergoes a change whereas a flat character does not undergo a change. Imagery is another significant part of a short story. There are various types of images - tactile, gustatory, visual, aural, olfactory, concrete, abstract, natural. These images are of wide significant as through them the message, tone and mood of a short story are conveyed meaningfully. Teaching short story can be done through the integrated approach (integration of reading, speaking, writing) as far as the teaching methodology is concerned. Appropriate and relevant tasks are set to teach the students the ingredients of short story. They are writing the gist of a short story, the traits of characters, prediction, activities, process, question, questions of inference, question of evaluation etc. In this way a short story is taught in classroom and students will acquire a good knowledge of the language.

Relationship between university students’ emotional expression on tweets and subjective well-being: Considering the effects of their self-presentation and online communication skills

This study investigated how personal characteristics such as generalized trust, self-consciousness and friendship, and desire for self-presentation are related to the subjective well-being of university students who use Twitter in Japan, including the effects of their online communication skills. We conducted a survey in May 2021 with Twitter users and analyzed their log data between January 2019 and June 2021. The log data of 501 Twitter users, including the number of public tweets, retweets, and emotional expressions among different patterns of social media (e.g., Twitter only, Twitter + Instagram, Twitter + LINE + Instagram, etc.) and academic standings, were analyzed using ANOVA and stepwise regression analyses. The results showed that the number of tweets and retweets, with and without photos/videos, increased in 2020 and 2021 compared to 2019, and the ratio of positive sentences remained almost the same for the two-and-a-half-year period of this study. However, the proportion of negative sentences increased slightly. It is clear that the factors which affected the university students’ subjective well-being differed depending on the respective patterns of social media use.

Significance of Negative Sentences Structures in the Verses of the Noble Qur’an


 
 
 
 This research sought to reveal the significance of the negative sentences structures in the verses of Tanzih the Noble Qur’an; through using the linguistic and syntactical tools contained in the structures of those sentences.
 In this research, we concluded that the significance of the structures of the negative sentences in the verses of the honorable Qur’an came in response to the infidels and polytheists who accused the Quran of many charges that have no basis or foundation. These indications varied with the variety of accusations directed at the Quran. Doubt, about alteration, about crookedness, about poetry and fortune-telling, and about the words of devils, and about humor. As for the meaning of the structures of the negative phrasal verbs, the Qur’an is clear about slander, about misery, about demons descending, and about coming up with the like of the Qur’an, and about falsehood, from crookedness, and from whims.
 
 
 
 
 What we can conclude from all of this is that the meanings of the negative sentences structures in the verses of the Noble Qur’an came to prove one undoubted fact that the Noble Qur’an is the Book of Allah that He revealed to His Prophet Muhammad (may Allah bless him and grant him peace), and it is free from falsehood and from everything that is not. befitting him; Because it is a download from Hakim Hamid.

Negation in English, Arabic and Kurdish: A Contrastive Study

The present study focuses on the points of similarities and differences found in English, Arabic and Kurdish languages in terms of negation. The three languages belong to different families and they all exist in the researchers own country (Iraq). Arabic is spoken natively in the middle, the western and the southern parts. Kurdish is spoken natively in the northern part called Kurdistan Region. English is a foreign language in all parts of Iraq. All the three languages under study are taught as school subjects all over Iraq in general and higher education. Negation is dealt with in the three languages mentioned above in terms of word negation and sentence negation. Word negation discusses the way in which a word is negated, i.e., how prefixes and suffixes are used to reverse the meaning of the word an affix is added to. Sentence negation is dealt with in terms of how the affirmative declarative sentence is negated in all the three languages mentioned above. Findings show that negation in the three languages under examination is different parametrically.

The Syntax of the Epistemic Modal kaan in Jordanian Arabic

The goal of this study is to investigate the syntax of the epistemic modal item kaan in Jordanian Arabic (JA). It was pointed out that kaan is a deductive epistemic modal marker that expresses probability based on sensory fact/s. We have argued that this kaan is an epistemic modal adverb heading Epistemic Modal Phrase (MepP) in the left periphery, above TP. That kaan precedes existential fii, sentential negation, and a topicalized item as well as a focused item empirically supports the hypothesis that kaan resides in the left-periphery. In order to explain lack of agreement affixes on kaan along the lines of the minimalist approach (Chomsky 2000, 2001), we have assumed that kaan does not carry semantically uninterpretable features and lexically unvalued features that need to be checked. Finally, it was found that epistemic kaan may not occur in non-declarative sentences. This exclusion was explained in light of the truth conditions that non-declarative clauses lack. Keywords: Modal, Epistemic Modal, Left-Periphery, Syntax, Jordanian Arabic.

The Effect of Input Flooding and Explicit Instruction on L2 Acquisition of English Inverse Scope

This article investigates how different types of input and instruction can affect L1-Mandarin L2-English learners’ acquisition of English inverse scope. English quantifier–negation sentences such as All the kids didn’t climb the tree are ambiguous between a surface-scope reading (‘none of the kids climbed the tree’) and an inverse-scope reading (‘it is not the case that all the kids climbed the tree’), while the Mandarin equivalent only has the surface-scope reading. Inverse scope can be challenging even for advanced learners, due to its low frequency in naturalistic input and/or its complex form–meaning mapping. The present study implemented an intervention with inverse scope: learners received either input flooding (increased frequency) or explicit instruction (explicit explanations about form–meaning mappings). For learners receiving explicit instruction, acceptance of inverse scope increased significantly after instruction. In contrast, learners receiving input flooding did not show significant improvement; results from debriefing questionnaires indicated that learners in the input flooding group failed to either notice the target structure or further process the input. This suggests that input flooding alone is not as effective as explicit instruction in learning a property that has complex form–meaning mapping, such as inverse scope.

Generalization of negation of a probability distribution

Negation is absolutely essential in all conversations that allows for denial, contradiction and other countering aspects of human linguistic systems. Intuitively, the negative sentences are less informative and less specific than the affirmative ones. In other words, it has more uncertainty embedded in it. If an event is uncertain, negating it will require some sort of probabilistic formulation. Yager (IEEE Trans Fuzzy Syst 25:1899–1902, 2015) gave a probabilistic definition of negation of a probability distribution based on unbiased distribution of probabilities. In the present work, a generalization of negation based on the concept of biased distribution is proposed. Some numerical examples have been discussed for determining the validity and efficacy of the proposed generalization. Finally an application in medical diagnosis has been considered.

Non-verbal predicate negation in child Emirati Arabic

ABSTRACT We provide an account of the developmental trajectory of Emirati Arabic negation particles. We treat the non-verbal predicate negator (NVPN) mub as a negative copula, in contrast to the verbal predicate negator (VPN) maa, which encodes sentential negation in verbal and existential contexts. The analysis is supported by evidence from a longitudinal corpus of six Emirati children. Given the high frequency of occurrence of maa in the ambient language, we show that an input-frequency account predicts maa-mub substitutions in early stages of acquisition. However, confirming previous findings by Becker we show that when mub emerges in later stages, its distribution exhibits an asymmetry: mub is used frequently with individual-level nominal/adjectival predicates but it almost never appears with stage level adjectival/prepositional/ adverbial predicates, mirroring the distribution of copular elements in child English (and other languages).

Acquisition of overt and covert and: support for the semantic subset principle

ABSTRACT The goal of this paper is to tease apart two approaches to the source of children’s consistent scope assignment in negative sentences containing logical connectives; the Semantic Subset Principle and the Semantic Subset Maxim. Previous developmental work has observed that four- to six-year-old children across languages have difficulty with disjunctive interpretations in these sentences and assign conjunctive interpretations. The results of our experiment however show that Japanese children can access the disjunctive interpretations when conjunctions are elided. This finding supports the idea that children are guided by the Semantic Subset Principle when determining the default value of any parameter associated with a logical connective.

Splitting NegP in Standard Arabic: A Syntactic Study into VSO Word Order in Negative Sentences

This paper strives to overcome the issues of achieving a VSO word order in negated sentences in Standard Arabic. A possible solution would be to split the Negative projection into two, where the higher head hosts the negative particle, and the lower head has the ability to attract and host the verb, which falls within the scope of the negative particle. Splitting the negative projection proved to be sufficient to maintain the integrity and validity of the other theories available in the Minimalist Program. Moreover, it allows for a distinction between the A-movement operation, where verbs move over the Subject to a higher position resulting in a VSO word order, and the A’-Movement operation of a fronted Determiner Phrase (DP) is moved to the utmost left for focal purposes.

Pragmatic Felicity Facilitates the Production and Comprehension of Negation

Negation is a fundamental element of language and logical systems, but processing negative sentences can be challenging. Early investigations suggested that this difficulty was due to the representational challenge of adding an additional logical element to a proposition. In more recent work, however, supportive contexts mitigate the processing costs of negation, suggesting that pragmatics can modulate this difficulty. We test the pragmatic hypothesis that listeners’ processing of negation is influenced by expectations about speakers’ production of negation by directly comparing speakers and listeners in two pairs of experiments. In both experiments, speakers produce negative sentences more often when they are both relevant and informative. And in both experiments, listeners in turn are fastest to respond to sentences that they expect speakers to produce. We argue that general pragmatic principles that apply to all sentences can help explain the challenges of processing negation.

Brain responses to negated and affirmative meanings in the auditory modality.

Negation is frequently used in natural language, yet relatively little is known about its processing. More importantly, what is known regarding the neurophysiological processing of negation is mostly based on results of studies using written stimuli (the word-by-word paradigm). While the results of these studies have suggested processing costs in connection to negation (increased negativities in brain responses), it is difficult to know how this translates into processing of spoken language. We therefore developed an auditory paradigm based on a previous visual study investigating processing of affirmatives, sentential negation (not), and prefixal negation (un-). The findings of processing costs were replicated but differed in the details. Importantly, the pattern of ERP effects suggested less effortful processing for auditorily presented negated forms (restricted to increased anterior and posterior positivities) in comparison to visually presented negated forms. We suggest that the natural flow of spoken language reduces variability in processing and therefore results in clearer ERP patterns.