Verbal Negation Research Articles

Относно реконструкцията на глагола „съществувам“ в прасемитския език

In his article “Proto-Semitic Existentials: *yθaw and *laθθaw” Benjamin Suchard proposes a reconstruction of the verb *yiytaw (“to exist”) in Proto-Semitic. According to Suchard, the original meaning of this verb was “to have” and he cites as its derivatives the verbs īšu “to have” and the negation laššu (“does not exist”) in Akkadian, the existential particles yēš (in Biblical Hebrew) and ’īt(ay) (“exists”) in Aramaic, as well as the negative verb laysa (“does not exist”, “not to be”) in Arabic. The similarities between the above-listed lexemes both formally but also semantically make Suchard’s idea attractive, yet an analysis of their usage raises serious questions. The current article proposes an alternative approach, which rejects Suchard’s postulated connections and reconstructs “to exist” in Proto-Semitic as *isu, a verb from which yəhī in Biblical Hebrew and yəhwē in Aramaic are derived, both having the meaning “to be”.

Syntactic and emotional interplay in second language: emotional resonance but not proficiency modulates affective influences on L2 syntactic processing

ABSTRACT Previous research has demonstrated the influence of emotions during linguistic processing, indicating the interactivity of both processes in the brain. However, little is known regarding such interplay in a second language (L2). This study addressed this question by examining the reading effects of syntactic violations while processing L2 emotional and neutral statements. Forty-six Spanish-English bilinguals with various levels of L2 proficiency and emotional resonance (i.e. capability for emotional experience in L2) were presented with a self-paced sentence reading task. Sentences contained positive (16), neutral (16) and negative (16) verbs, half of them presented in agreement and half in disagreement with the preceding pronoun. Analysis of verb reading times using linear mixed effects modelling revealed a significant interaction between syntactic violation, verb valence and emotional resonance, suggesting that stronger emotional L2 experience results in a higher saliency of negative verbs, reducing the impact of syntactic violations.

IMPLICIT NEGATION IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE: LINGUISTIC MEANS OF EXPRESSION AND FEATURES OF FUNCTIONING

This article explores how implicit negation, a form of negation that is not directly expressed in a language, is employed in contemporary English. It analyses lexical, grammatical, and stylistic methods of conveying negative meanings through examples from fiction and everyday conversations. Implicit negation relies on the context and semantics of linguistic units such as negative verbs, prefixes, rhetorical questions, irony, and sarcasm. This highlights the role of implicit negation in politeness strategies and softening of the tone of statements. Understanding implicit negation can deepen the connection between language and thought, with applications in English language teaching, translation, and intercultural communication.

Assessing contact-induced change in Palestinian Arabic: Evidence from Beirut

AbstractWe investigate whether Palestinian Arabic (PA), as spoken by the local Palestinian refugee population in Beirut, is converging with Lebanese Arabic (LA), the majority variety. Using a sociolinguistic framework, we target three variables considered to be susceptible to convergent change. We find evidence of contact-induced change in PA in the variable raising of word-medial /a:/ to [e:], as well as in the attrition of socially marked exponents of verbal negation. By contrast, in the case of the third variable, the future temporal reference system, the evidence for convergence is less compelling on account of key differences between the contact varieties, including the vertiginous rise of the proclitic future marker ħa- in PA. We implicate the respective social salience of the targeted variables in their differential susceptibility to convergence. Our results afford new insights into dialect contact and elucidate under-studied patterns of grammatical variation and change in Levantine Arabic.

The role of emotion in acquisition of verb meaning

ABSTRACT Children’s earliest acquired words are often learned through sensorimotor experience, but it is less clear how children learn the meaning of concepts whose referents are less associated with sensorimotor experience. The Affective Embodiment Account postulates that children use emotional experience to learn more abstract word meanings. There is mixed evidence for this account; analyses using mega-study datasets suggest that negative or positively valenced abstract words are learned earlier than emotionally neutral abstract words, yet the relationship between sensorimotor experience and valence is inconsistent across different methods of operationalising sensorimotor experience. In the present study, we tested the Affective Embodiment Account specifically in the context of verb acquisition. We tested two semantic dimensions of sensorimotor experience: concreteness and embodiment ratings. Our analyses showed that more positive and negative abstract verbs are acquired at an earlier age than neutral abstract verbs, consistent with the Affective Embodiment Account. When sensorimotor experience is operationalised as embodiment, high embodiment verbs are acquired at an earlier age than low embodiment verbs, and there is further benefit for high embodiment and positively valenced verbs. The findings further clarify the role of Affective Embodiment as a mechanism of language acquisition.

Aging-related Differences in Emotional Valence from the Verb Fluency Task Depending on the Time Period

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to identify differences between younger and older adults in emotional valence (EV) of words produced during the first and second halves of a 1-minute verb fluency (VF) task. We also sought to determine the relationships between EV, demographic information, VF performance, working memory (WM), and Korean-Mini Mental State Examination (K-MMSE).Methods: A total of 62 healthy individuals participated in the study, with 31 individuals in each age group. A VF-task was conducted for a 1-minute window. The ratios of positive or negative verbs were calculated for the first and second halves of the task period. Digit forward and backward tests were administered and treated as a single index of WM capacity.Results: Both groups produced significantly more positive-EV words than negative, and in the first 30s compared to last 30s. The older adults produced significantly more positive-EV words in the first 30s than the younger group. The positive-EV ratio of verbs in the first 30s showed a significant negative correlation with task performance, K-MMSE, and WM measure. It also showed significant positive correlation with participants’ age.Conclusion: The current study indicates a significant decline in word production rate over time, and a tendency of easily producing positive-EV words in both group. Furthermore, the study revealed the elderly’s positivity effect on task performance. Lastly, using more positive-EV words in the early period of task tendency was significantly and negatively correlated with the task performance, WM measures, and K-MMSE.

Variation in verbal negation in Jordanian Arabic: A corpus-based analysis

Jordanian Arabic (JA) has two main patterns for verbal negation, i.e., preverbal negation (ma: ….) and discontinuous negation (ma: …. -ʃ). This article provides a variationist account of the distribution of these two patterns in light of a number of social and linguistic factors. The social factors include age, gender, educational attainment and region. The linguistic factors, on the other hand, include the transitivity of the verb, the tense of the associate utterance, the stativity and the lexical type of the verb (i.e., cognitive, desiderative, speech and perception), as well as the person, animacy and definiteness of the associate subject. Following distributional and multivariate analyses of 40 sociolinguistic interviews (more than 30 hours of audio-recordings), we find that all social factors (education, gender, region and age), the lexical type of the verb, the definiteness of the subject and the tense of the associate utterance have a significant impact on the selection of the negation patterns in JA. Such preferences are argued to follow from independent factors, including the speaker's regional background, gender identity and prestige.

Etymology of the Udmurt enimitive uk and grammaticalization of discourse particles

This paper deals with the etymology of the Udmurt enimitive marker uk. Contrary to the existing etymologies, which claim uk to be either a Chuvash or a Tatar borrowing, I claim that it was in fact grammaticalized from a tag question construction, which involves a negative verb and a question particle. This is supported by early written sources and dialectal data. Casting the net in a diachronically and geographically diverse variety of sources allows one to find traces of earlier grammaticalization stages that support my claim. Given that there are conceptually very similar enimitive constructions in the Samoyedic languages, negative interrogatives may prove to be an important grammaticalization source for the enimitive markers. Apart from uk, I examine several other cognate particles, which apparently were formed in a similar way.

Negative Events and Compositional Semantics

AbstractMotivated by intuitive parallels between event descriptions with and without linguistic negation, we develop a formalization of negative events. We propose that verbal negation denotes a function ${\textit{Neg}}$, which sends any set of events $P$ to a set ${\textit{Neg}}(P)$ constrained by a principle ensuring that any event in ${\textit{Neg}}(P)$ occurs if and only if no event in $P$ does. This allows us to construe the events in ${\textit{Neg}}(P)$ as negative, “anti-$P$”, events. Our formalization of ${\textit{Neg}}$ is conceptually related to truthmaker semantics but only requires standard logical tools, and it is compatible with standard versions of event semantics. We develop an explicit syntax-semantics interface and compositional analyses of the interaction of negation with disjunction, conjunction, quantifiers, and nonfinite perception reports.

‘I haven’t got a clue!’

Abstract Support-verb constructions are combinations of a verb and a noun that act as the predicate, as ‘made the suggestion’ in I made the suggestion that she join. They are frequent, variable, and ambiguous across texts, as well as language-specific in their lexical and syntactic properties. The article examines patterns of negation with δίκην δίδωμι ‘to pay the price for one’s actions’, ὅπλα ἔχω ‘to be armed’, and συμμαχίαν ποιέομαι ‘to ally up’ in classical literary Attic. Syntactically and lexically, support-verb constructions can behave like a word or like a syntagm. A word does not have an internal syntax but only an external one; a syntagm has an internal syntax. Negation in support-verb constructions can be achieved either morpho-syntactically or lexically as long as the syntagm character has not faded. Morpho-syntactically, support-verb constructions can be negated by drawing on their external or their internal syntax. Lexical negation can be achieved by means of negative verbs of realisation indicating a zero-degree of multiplication. If available for a support-verb construction, lexical negation appears to add a nuance of intensity; morpho-syntactic negation appears primarily in contrastive contexts.

Guided induction and deductive instruction: Analyzing efficiency versus depth of processing in the L2 acquisition of Palestinian Arabic

The present study examined the effects of guided induction (GI) and deductive instruction (DI) on the acquisition of verbal negation structure in spoken Palestinian Arabic (PA) using an interpretation task in a self-paced reading paradigm. The experimental design featured a 30- item pre-test, posttest and a delayed test used to assess the short- and long- term accuracy gains and reaction times. Twenty-seven learners of Arabic as a foreign language participated in the experiment. Results indicated that both groups benefited from their respective intervention at the immediate level as indicated by accuracy gains. However, only the guided induction group improved significantly from pretest to posttest, administered 4 weeks later. It also showed that while both groups performed comparably at the immediate level, GI group outperformed DI on the delayed test. Additionally, while reading times data was not informative, GI took significantly longer response time than DI. These results are in line with Cerezo et al. (2016) and Zhuang (2019)who found an edge for GI. In addition to finding a main effect for GI, results are original in terms of experimenting with the complex Arabic negation structure, thus extending evidence to a novel structure with multi-layered complexity.

Bantu negative verbs: a typological-comparative investigation of form, function and distribution

Bantu negative verbs: a typological-comparative investigation of form, function and distribution

Negatively-Formatted Requests for Confirmation in Korean Conversation: Three Types of Verbal Negation as Interactional Resources

Abstract From a conversation-analytic perspective, this article analyzes three types of verbal negation in Korean, which shape requests for confirmation (RfCs) into distinctive interactional resources. The pre-verbal negation (an) RfC emerges in the context where the recipient is prompted to see the “fittedness” of its confirmable as referencing an “allusive” aspect of his/her situated domain, inferentially formulated by the questioner as a “negative event.” The post-verbal negation (ci anh) renders the RfC a vehicle for making mitigated assertions, seeking the recipient’s agreement in acquiescence to the questioner’s “problematizing” stance. The use of post-nominalization negation (nun-ke ani) RfC exhibits the questioner’s “conjecturing” stance, displaying norm-based deontic orientations treating the noted event at hand as deviant or counter-expectational. The target of the confirmable is formulated an “entity” assessable by the recipient as an externally-positioned co-member/evaluator. Cross-linguistic implications of the findings are discussed, in relation to English tag questions and negative interrogatives.

A Comparative Study of Evidential Verb in Research Papers by Chinese and American Scholars: An Example of Experimental Research Paper on Oil and Gas

Evidentiality refers to the speaker’s attitude towards the source of information and the reliability of the information conveyed and is one of the most important micro features of academic discourse. This study compared how Chinese and American researchers differed in the use of evidential verbs in their texts, the use of evidential verbs in 200 Chinese and American oil and gas experimental research papers is compared in this study using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies based on a comparative corpus. It was found that both Chinese and American students were able to learn the evidential verbs of empirical research and use more appropriate language to describe the course of the experimental research and its results, but Chinese students used less verbs, particularly perceptual, cognitive, and verbal evidential verbs. Chinese scholars struggle to take ownership of discourse and tend to employ negative verbs less frequently and their essays use a more homogeneous vocabulary. These findings highlight some of the writing issues Chinese scholars encounter while writing papers in the English language; this paper analyzes these issues and offers suggestions for academic writing.

The Structure of Dagbani Sentential Negation*

AbstractThe goal of this paper is to provide an account of the syntactic expression of sentential negation in Dagbani, a Mabia, Niger‐Congo language of West Africa. I show that Dagbani employs two strategies for the marking of sentential negation: negative markers/particles and negative verbs. The overtly expressed negative markers are kù/bì and dì, used for negating declaratives and imperatives, respectively. Besides, the inherently negative verb ká is used to negate possessive‐locative‐existential constructions. The paper further demonstrates that there is an incompatibility between the negative marker and the imperative morpheme in Dagbani and attempts to account for this empirical fact. In line with recent probe‐based Minimalist account of negation, I assume that the negative markers (heads) carry a [iNeg] feature, which is interpretable, and its interpretation triggers a negative polarity of the clause. I further offer a formal account for the incompatibility between the imperative negation marker dì and the imperative morpheme.

Lirica Blagiană – (Re)Lecturi Cantitative. Negația

Abstract This paper is aiming to analyze the occurence and some functional and pragmatic aspects of the types of negation in all Lucian Blaga’s volumes of poetry. By using a quantitative approach, we have proved the stylistic effect of negation in his poetry and the importance of the negation with positive connotations in his verse. Beginning with the verbal negation, this paper goes through all the other types of it acoording to Rodica Zafiu’s classification: the negation of constituent, the expletive negation, the pro-sentence and the restrictions with a negative form.

Using corpora to reveal style in translation: The case of The Song of Everlasting Sorrow.

This article reports on a corpus-based study of the English translation of Wang Anyi's award-winning novel, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow [, Chang Hen Ge] from the perspective of style. Using the keyword and concordance functions of corpus software packages AntConc and ParaConc, this research focuses on how the translator's style reveals itself in the target text (TT) as well as how the style of the source text (ST) is represented in the TT. Findings show that the translators have a preference for contracted negative verb forms and expressions such as "bit" over "little," making the text more colloquial. In general, the rendering of the ST style tends not to be entirely faithful. A distinction between reader-centered and text-centered keywords is made. While the reader-centered ST keywords are, as expected, largely altered, the translation of text-centered ST keywords is also rewritten, contrary to expectations. Presumably, the translators tended to reduce the ambiguity of the ST, resulting in a more explicit TT. The article argues that the translators chose to rewrite the translation to make it more understandable for the target audience since it concerned a work from a source culture very different from the target culture.

Text Feature Extraction and Representation of Chinese Mental Verbs Based on Deep Learning

There are some problems in feature extraction and representation of Chinese mental verbs, such as low accuracy and low efficiency. In order to further improve the computational efficiency and accuracy of Chinese mental verb text, based on deep learning theory, activation function and damage function were used to optimize the original model. Considering the calculation method of model gradient, the optimization model describing the characteristics of Chinese mental verbs is finally obtained. The model can be used to analyze the variation of the characteristic parameters of Chinese verbs and the method of representation. Finally, the model error is analyzed by the method of comparative verification. Relevant studies show that the number of outputs and output results corresponding to softmax function will influence the test results of the model. By comparing the curves, it can be seen that the curve corresponding to the output number has an obvious increasing trend, while the corresponding output result curve has an opposite changing trend. The linear and nonlinear characteristics of the two curves are obvious. The real value of the mean square error function shows a change of linear increase, while the corresponding output value shows a change trend of gradual decline, which indicates that the two kinds of data have different influences on the model under related algorithms. It can be seen from the error data that the gradual increase of independent variables will improve the accuracy of the test results. Five different Chinese mental verb parameters have different manifestations in the deep learning model: among them, declarative verbs fluctuate in a small range and have little corresponding influence. However, the fluctuation of nondeclarative verbs and positive and negative declarative verbs is relatively small, and the curve is relatively stable. Negative verbs have a positive influence on the test output. Double negative verbs have negative effects. Finally, the accuracy of the model is verified by calculating the difference between experimental data and model data. This research can provide theoretical support and model verification method for the application of deep learning model in other fields of Chinese language.

Negation during communication in Amele

Abstract The Amele language of Papua New Guinea is one of many Trans-New Guinea languages spoken in Papua New Guinea. Amele has a negator ‘qee’ (‘q’ represents a voiced dorso-labiovelar plosive), which follows the element negated. Yet, while having verb conjugations for persons and numbers, Amele has no negative conjugation in the present tense. Typologically, some other languages, for example, Finnish, also exhibit negative conjugations of verbs, but these behaviors of the negations differ in interesting ways. This contrastive study investigates the negation of grammars in Amele (Papua New Guinea) and Finnish (Finland, Uralic), by comparing negative particles and negative verb conjugations in both of these languages, while clarifying their morphological behaviors. As such, the study describes Amele’s and Finnish’s positive-negative and present/past distinctions through their verbal morphologies and through their functional markedness in past tenses, ultimately observing these functional points in the languages.

GÜNEY AZERBAYCAN TÜRKÇESİNDE BİR EDİLGENLİK İŞARETLEYİCİSİ: -mAK ol-

Güney Azerbaycan Türkçesinde -mAK ol- yapısı, esas itibarıyla bir edilgenlik işaretleyicisidir. Fiil + -mAK ol- dizilişindeki yapının hem olumlu hem de olumsuz çekimleri kullanımdadır. Bu yapıda çoğunlukla odaksıl olmayan ve her zaman, sürekli olan olayların sunulmasında kullanılan -(y)(A)r, -(y)(X)r ~ -(y)(X)rI / -mAz ~ -mAs, -mXr ~ -mXrI geniş ve şimdiki zaman eklerine yer verilmektedir. -mAK ol- yapılı cümlelerde genellikle düsturlar, kurallar, genel kabuller, gelenekler, yasaklar vb. yargılar bildirilmektedir. Bu cümlelerde edilgenliğin yanında ayrıca bağlama göre yeterlilik, yetersizlik ve gereklilik kiplik anlamları da aktarılmaktadır.
 -mAK ol- yapısıyla edilgenliğin bildirilmesi Türkiye Türkçesinde de bulunmaktadır. İki lehçe alanı arasında söz konusu yapının kullanım sınırları ve işlevleri bakımından birleşen ve ayrılan özellikler vardır. Türkiye Türkçesinde de -mAK ol- yapısından sonra genellikle -Ar ~ -Xr ~ -r / -mAz geniş zaman ekleri getirilmektedir. Fakat Türkiye Türkçesinde -mAK ol- yapısı, hem olumlu hem de olumsuz fiillerden sonra kullanılmaktadır. Olumsuz çekimli -mAK ol- yapısı, olumlu fiile eklendiğinde edilgen-olumsuz anlamda fiil; olumsuz fiile eklendiğinde ise edilgen-olumlu anlamda fiil ortaya çıkmaktadır. Türkiye Türkçesinde -mAK ol- yapılı edilgenlikle gereklilik kipliği de sunulmaktadır.