Scope Of Negation Research Articles

Co-speech gesture projection: Evidence from inferential judgments

The nature of the semantic contribution of co-speech gestures has been the subject of recent theoretical and experimental investigation. Such gestures have been reported to give rise to cosuppositional inferences that can project out of certain linguistic environments, much in the way that presuppositions of verbal expressions do (Schlenker 2018a; b). For example, a sentence like “John will not [use the stairs]_UP”, produced with a finger pointed upwards while pronouncing the verb phrase, is argued to give rise to the inference that if John were to use the stairs, he would go up the stairs. Tieu et al. (2017) investigated the projection properties of directional inferences associated with the gestures UP and DOWN, using a Truth Value Judgment Task and a Picture Selection Task, and reported the presence of existential projection of the gestural inferences out of quantified environments. We investigated the same gestural inferences using a method that more closely tracks the introspective judgments reported in the literature on gesture projection. Participants were presented with an Inferential Judgment Task, in which they had to rate the strength of inferences arising from UP and DOWN in six different linguistic environments. Using this task, we observed projection of the conditional inference from the scope of negation and universal projection of the inference from the scope of “none” and “exactly one”, as well as suggestive evidence that the inference can be locally accommodated in the scope of negation and “none.” These main findings would be difficult to explain if gestures were posited to make at-issue contributions; the finding of local accommodation is also not straightforwardly explained on the view that co-speech gestures contribute supplement-like meanings (Ebert & Ebert 2014). On the other hand, both main findings are compatible with the view that co-speech gestures trigger cosuppositions.

The abundance inference of pluralised mass nouns is an implicature: Evidence from Greek

Across languages, plural marking on count nouns typically gives rise to a multiplicity inference, indicating that the noun ranges over sums with a cardinality of 2 or more. Plural marking has also been observed to occur on mass nouns in Greek and a few other languages, giving rise to a parallel abundance inference, indicating that there is a lot of the relevant substance. It has been observed in the literature that both of these inferences disappear in downward-entailing environments, such as when a plural appears in the scope of negation (Tsoulas 2009; Kane et al. 2015). There are two main competing approaches in the literature that aim to account for the described pattern with respect to multiplicity inferences: the ambiguity approach (Farkas & de Swart 2010) and the implicature approach (Sauerland 2003; Spector 2007; Mayr 2015, among others). As discussed in Tieu et al. (2018), while both approaches can account for the upward- versus downward-entailing pattern of multiplicity inferences, they differ in what they predict with respect to the acquisition of these inferences and their relationship with implicatures. Tieu et al. (2014; 2018) investigated multiplicity inferences in English and reported evidence for the implicature approach. In this paper, we first show how the ambiguity approach and the implicature approach to the multiplicity inference can be extended to account for the abundance inference. We then report on an experiment that tests the predictions of the two approaches for multiplicity and abundance inferences in preschool-aged children and adult native speakers of Greek. Our results replicate the patterns reported in Tieu et al. (2014; 2018) for multiplicity inferences, and crucially reveal an analogous pattern for abundance inferences. Adults computed both kinds of inferences more in upward-entailing environments than in downward-entailing ones, and children computed fewer inferences overall than adults did. These results reflect an overall pattern of implicature calculation in line with a unified implicature analysis across the three kinds of inferences. By contrast, we discuss how they pose a challenge for the ambiguity approach.

A syntactic path-based hybrid neural network for negation scope detection

The automatic detection of negation is a crucial task in a wide-range of natural language processing (NLP) applications, including medical data mining, relation extraction, question answering, and sentiment analysis. In this paper, we present a syntactic path-based hybrid neural network architecture, a novel approach to identify the scope of negation in a sentence. Our hybrid architecture has the particularity to capture salient information to determine whether a token is in the scope or not, without relying on any human intervention. This approach combines a bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) network and a convolutional neural network (CNN). The CNN model captures relevant syntactic features between the token and the cue within the shortest syntactic path in both constituency and dependency parse trees. The Bi-LSTM learns the context representation along the sentence in both forward and backward directions. We evaluate our model on the Bioscope corpus, and get 90.82% F-score (78.31% PCS) on the abstract sub-corpus, outperforming features-dependent approaches.

A contra-linguistic study of negation in Korean and English

Abstract Negation is frequently found in every language, and many logicians or linguists have been carrying out research on it. Their investigations are, however, mostly confined to the languages of Europe. Although some of them pay attention to non-European languages, we can hardly find research on negation in Korean. In this paper, we carry out contra-linguistic analysis of four aspects of negation in Korean and English. First, we compare the expressions of negative elements in Korean and English sentences. Second, we contrast the types of negation in Korean with those of English. Third, we draw a distinction between Korean and English in what decides the scope of negation. Finally, we contrast the answers to questions which contain negative elements.

Zur Komposition von insofern als im Deutschen

Abstract This paper is about the compositional interpretation of adverbial clauses as introduced by insofern als (lit. ‘insofar as’) in German (= IAs); for example, Die Lösung ist insofern attraktiv, als sie günstig ist. (lit. ‘The solution is insofar attractive as it is cheap.’). I argue that IAs always contribute dimensional restrictions, but do so in two distinct structure-sensitive ways: IAs can be structurally integrated into their host clauses and, thus, dimensionally specify a lexical component of the matrix VP (= LIAs) (‘The solution is attractive in price.’); alternatively, they can be structurally non-integrated and, thus, provide a dimension against which the matrix sentence is evaluated holistically (= SIAs) (‘In light of the fact that the solution is cheap, one may say that it is attrac­tive.’). The proposal is supported by both syntactic and semantic-pragmatic evidence: (i) LIAs and SIAs are distinguished by independently motivated tests for structural (non)integration such as scope of negation and particles, focus-background structure, and variable binding. (ii) LIAs are sensitive to a lexically given multidimensional matrix predication. SIAs, by contrast, require that the embedded clause specify an objective justification for the truth of the matrix proposition as a whole. In particular, IAs are shown to not pass tests for subjectivity as discussed for finden (‘find’); for example, judge- dependency, resistance against denial, or, accessibility of a subjective attitude. The paper concludes by sketching a formal derivation of both readings. Accordingly, LIAs constrain the dimensional parameter of multidimensional lexical predications, while SIAs provide facts that de re justify the assertibility of predications for topic situations.

A set of semantic and pragmatic criteria for descriptive vs. metalinguistic negation

This article is about metalinguistic negation and the types of criteria making a straightforward distinction between descriptive (DN) and metalinguistic negation (MN). First, I will distinguish three types of negation: one type of DN and two types of MN, where MN1 is upward metalinguistic negation and MN2 presuppositional metalinguistic negation. This distinction is based on two semantic criteria (entailment and scope of negation), and one discursive or pragmatic criterion (connectives). Then, the use of the connective criterion will imply that maisSN (Ger. sondern and Sp. sino) triggers DN, whereas maisPA (Ger. aber, Sp. pero) licenses MN1 and a causal connective like parce que ‘because’ or puisque ‘since’ generates MN2. The general philosophy of the analysis of negation is both monoguist (negation is semantically unambiguous, and its meaning is logical) and contextual (there is no reinterpretation of the negative clause when negation is metalinguistic). Finally, this article aims to lend theoretical support to the experimental work on negation reported in Blochowiak & Grisot (2018).

Grammaticalized number, implicated presuppositions, and the plural

Plural morphology exhibits differing interpretations across languages. For example, in downward entailing contexts in English, the plural receives a one or more (or inclusive) interpretation, whereas in Korean-like languages the plural always receives a more than one (or exclusive) interpretation, regardless of context. Previous experimental work using an artificial language suggests that such differences may follow from structural properties of these languages (Liter, Heffner & Schmitt 2017), namely lack of grammaticalization of the plural/singular distinction. In this paper we adopt Sauerland, Anderssen & Yatsushiro’s (2005) implicated presupposition analysis of the plural (the English plural is semantically unmarked, whereas the Korean plural is semantically marked, carrying a presupposition that the cardinality of its referent is greater than one) in order to test two hypotheses about the interpretation of the plural. Using an artificial language learning paradigm identical to that in Liter, Heffner & Schmitt (2017) with non-grammaticalized number but with a much greater frequency of singular/plural NPs in the input, we test (i) whether semantic markedness of the plural should be linked to the non-grammaticalization of the number paradigm; or (ii) whether semantic markedness follows from insufficient statistical evidence for simplifying the lexical entry for the plural. Our results show that participants continue to assign an exclusive interpretation to plural morphology under the scope of negation, which is compatible with the hypothesis that non-grammaticalized number entails semantic markedness.

Negation handling in sentiment classification using rule-based adapted from Indonesian language syntactic for Indonesian text in Twitter

The presence of the word negation is able to change the polarity of the text if it is not handled properly it will affect the performance of the sentiment classification. Negation words in Indonesian are ‘tidak’, ‘bukan’, ‘belum’ and ‘jangan’. Also, there is a conjunction word that able to reverse the actual values, as the word ‘tetapi’, or ‘tapi’. Unigram has shortcomings in dealing with the existence of negation because it treats negation word and the negated words as separate words. A general approach for negation handling in English text gives the tag ‘NEG_’ for following words after negation until the first punctuation. But this may gives the tag to un-negated, and this approach does not handle negation and conjunction in one sentences. The rule-based method to determine what words negated by adapting the rules of Indonesian language syntactic of negation to determine the scope of negation was proposed in this study. With adapting syntactic rules and tagging “NEG_” using SVM classifier with RBF kernel has better performance results than the other experiments. Considering the average F1-score value, the performance of this proposed method can be improved against baseline equal to 1.79% (baseline without negation handling) and 5% (baseline with existing negation handling) for a dataset that all tweets contain negation words. And also for the second dataset that has the various number of negation words in document tweet. It can be improved against baseline at 2.69% (without negation handling) and 3.17% (with existing negation handling).

‘Doing the devil’: Deriving the PPI-hood of a negation-expressing multi-dimensional idiom

Abstract This paper discusses the German idiomatic expression einen/den Teufel tun ‘do a/the devil’ which is used for emphatic rejection. It is shown that this expression is a PPI, as it cannot occur in the scope of negation. I will motivate that the asserted content of the expression is negation. With German being a non-negative concord language, the co-occurrence of several expressions of negation is usually avoided. This typological fact leads to two different judgement patterns for sentences with einen/den Teufel tun and a negation marker. The expression also contributes a conventional implicature that expresses an attitude of the subject. This conventional implicature shows an interaction with negation similar to that of evaluative adverbs. I will argue that the PPI-hood of the considered expression is fully reducible to its properties as an idiomatic negation marker in a non-negative concord language and its multi-dimensional semantics.

Positive polarity predicates

AbstractThis paper presents Dutch and English predicates that behave as positive polarity items and provides a partial, semantically-grounded classification of this group of PPIs. The items are studied from the perspective of anti-licensing behavior (by negation, either locally or long-distance, in questions, and by weakly negative quantifiers such aslittleandfew). Predicates, unlike quantifiers, do not have wide scope readings (which allow quantificational PPIs such assomebodyto appear in the syntactic scope of negation). Using a mixture of corpus data and introspective judgments, we show that anti-licensing among PPIs is not uniform (mirroring earlier results on NPIs which likewise show considerable variation). Rescuing contexts are likewise shown to differ among PPIs. Some of the PPI predicates show complex interaction with illocutionary force (especially mandative force), and others with differences between presupposed and asserted propositions. High degree predicates, finally, point toward the existence of connections between the marking of degree and positive polarity. PPI status is argued to be the result of a complex interaction between the effects of negation and other nonveridical operators, and other semantic factors, which differ among subclasses of PPIs. Anti-licensing by weak negation correlates fairly well with anti-licensing by long-distance negation, a finding which is (partly) in line with a recent proposal by Spector (2014, Global positive polarity items and obligatory exhaustivity.Semantics and Pragmatics7(11). 1–61) concerning global PPIs. However, we find there to be more variation among the PPIs studied here than the classification of Spector (2014) or any binary classification stipulates.

PPIs under negation: A case study of Italian già

AbstractThis paper investigates the Italian elementgià‘already’ under negation in various contexts, including questions. The occurrence ofgiàunder negation in questions is unexpected becausegiàcannot be licensed in declarative sentences with sentential negation (It. *Non ho già fatto colazione. literally ‘I did not have breakfast already.’). The empirical contribution of this paper is to provide a corpus analysis and to describe the contexts in whichgiàcan appear under negation. The main research questions of this paper are as follows: (i) how do we account for the distribution and the licensing conditions ofgiàunder negation? and (ii) how is the meaning ofgiàrelated to its distribution? This paper shows that some syntactic restrictions are responsible for the distribution ofgiàunder negation, and that in contexts wheregiàappears under negation in questions or conditionals, it is not interpreted under the direct scope of negation.

Adverb Placement and Scope of Negation

Adverb Placement and Scope of Negation

String‐Vacuous Head Movement in Japanese: New Evidence from Verb‐Echo Answers

AbstractWhether Japanese has verb raising or not has been one of the most contentious issues in the literature for more than 20 years. This Remark presents novel evidence for string‐vacuous head movement from the previously unexplored perspective of verb‐echo answers. We propose that such an answer form in Japanese is derived through V–T–C movement in overt syntax, followed byTPellipsis at Phonological Form (PF), rejecting the alternativepro‐drop analysis. Our analysis is supported by a wide range of new facts on verb‐echo answers, including the indefinitepro‐drop restriction, the impossibility of voice mismatches, and adverb‐inclusive interpretations. Because our theory presupposes head movement as its central analytical premise, the results of this article indicate that Japanese grammar is equipped with string‐vacuous verb raising. We will also briefly explore some curious behaviors of verb raising in Japanese relating to the scope of negation under ellipsis and intervention effects. We will argue that this phenomenon differs fundamentally from its counterpart in European languages such as French in that the former is an optional operation in narrow syntax that only occurs if it yields new outcomes atPFand/or Logical Form (LF).

A new perspective on the shielding property of positive polarity

In certain languages, disjunctions exhibit positive polarity behavior, which Szabolcsi (2002) argues can be diagnosed via the following four properties: (i) anti-licensing: no narrow scope interpretation under a clausemate negation, (ii) rescuing: acceptable in the scope of an even number of negative operators, (iii) shielding: acceptable under a clausemate negation if a universal quantifier intervenes, and (iv) locality of anti-licensing: acceptable in the scope of an extra-clausal negation. In recent work, Nicolae (2016, 2017), building on Spector 2014, argues that what distinguishes PPI disjunctions from polarity insensitive disjunctions is the fact that PPI-disjunctions obligatorily trigger epistemic inferences. That analysis, however, only accounts for the first two PPI properties. This paper extends that analysis to account for the second two properties, concluding that they should be seen as instantiations of the same phenomena, namely shielding by a universal quantifier.

Relevance of the SFU ReviewSP-NEG corpus annotated with the scope of negation for supervised polarity classification in Spanish

Up to now, negation is a challenging problem in the context of Sentiment Analysis. The study of negation implies the correct identification of negation markers, the scope and the interpretation of how negation affects the words that are within it, that is, whether it modifies their meaning or not and if so, whether it reverses, reduces or increments their polarity value. In addition, if we are interested in managing reviews in languages other than English, the issue becomes even more problematic due to the lack of resources. The present work shows the validity of the SFU ReviewSP-NEG corpus, which we annotated at negation level, for training supervised polarity classification systems in Spanish. The assessment has involved the comparison of different supervised models. The results achieved show the validity of the corpus and allow us to state that the annotation of how negation affects the words that are within its scope is important. Therefore, we propose to add a new phase to tackle negation in polarity classification systems (phase iii): i) identification of negation cues, ii) determination of the scope of negation, iii) identification of how negation affects the words that are within its scope, and iv) polarity classification taking into account negation.

The Interpretation of Plural Morphology and (Non-)Obligatory Number Marking: an Argument from Artificial Language Learning

ABSTRACTWe present an artificial language experiment investigating (i) how speakers of languages such as English with two-way obligatory distinctions between singular and plural learn a system where singular and plural are only optionally marked, and (ii) how learners extend their knowledge of the plural morpheme when under the scope of negation without explicit training. Production and comprehension results suggest that speakers of English did learn a system with only optional marking of number. Additionally, subjects did not accept an inclusive (“one or more than one”) interpretation of the plural when under the scope of negation, as in their native language, but rather assigned it an exclusive (“more than one”) interpretation. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that the meaning assigned to plural morphology is sensitive to the architecture of the system. In a binary number system with obligatory number marking, plural morphology can sometimes receive an inclusive interpretation. However, in a system where plural marking is never obligatory, plural morphology has an exclusive interpretation.

Interclausal NEG raising and the scope of negation

In this paper, we show that the syntactic analysis of one major type of NEG raising in Collins & Postal (2014) is inconsistent with the facts of negation scope revealed by Klima (1964) type tests for sentential negation. Two of the four original Klima tests plus three additional ones are discussed. We propose a novel alternative syntactic analysis, one also involving NEG raising, that is consistent with the relevant tests, as well as with all the principles of NEG raising and NEG deletion proposed in Collins & Postal (2014). We suggest, further, that the newer analysis permits a more uniform overall conception of the various cases of NEG Raising.

SNPPhenA: a corpus for extracting ranked associations of single-nucleotide polymorphisms and phenotypes from literature

BackgroundSingle Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) are among the most important types of genetic variations influencing common diseases and phenotypes. Recently, some corpora and methods have been developed with the purpose of extracting mutations and diseases from texts. However, there is no available corpus, for extracting associations from texts, that is annotated with linguistic-based negation, modality markers, neutral candidates, and confidence level of associations.MethodIn this research, different steps were presented so as to produce the SNPPhenA corpus. They include automatic Named Entity Recognition (NER) followed by the manual annotation of SNP and phenotype names, annotation of the SNP-phenotype associations and their level of confidence, as well as modality markers. Moreover, the produced corpus was annotated with negation scopes and cues as well as neutral candidates that play crucial role as far as negation and the modality phenomenon in relation to extraction tasks.ResultThe agreement between annotators was measured by Cohen’s Kappa coefficient where the resulting scores indicated the reliability of the corpus. The Kappa score was 0.79 for annotating the associations and 0.80 for the confidence degree of associations. Further presented were the basic statistics of the annotated features of the corpus in addition to the results of our first experiments related to the extraction of ranked SNP-Phenotype associations. The prepared guideline documents render the corpus more convenient and facile to use. The corpus, guidelines and inter-annotator agreement analysis are available on the website of the corpus: http://nil.fdi.ucm.es/?q=node/639.ConclusionSpecifying the confidence degree of SNP-phenotype associations from articles helps identify the strength of associations that could in turn assist genomics scientists in determining phenotypic plasticity and the importance of environmental factors. What is more, our first experiments with the corpus show that linguistic-based confidence alongside other non-linguistic features can be utilized in order to estimate the strength of the observed SNP-phenotype associations. Trial Registration: Not Applicable

Sentential negation in South African Sign Language: A case study

As with other sign languages, South African Sign Language (SASL) expresses negation using both manual and non-manual features. In this case study, naturalistic data provided by two native signers of SASL are analysed to show the syntactic relationship between these two sets of features. Using a Principles and Parameters approach and Government and Binding Theory, we investigate the syntactic scope of negation in our SASL data. We observe that side-to-side headshake, as a non-manual feature, appears to be the chief clausal negator in SASL, with a clause-final manual negative particle, NOT, playing a secondary role. We describe the negative headshake as a featural affix which is base-generated in the head of NegP and triggers V-to-Neg raising. The negative particle NOT appears to be base-generated in the Specifier of NegP. Suggestions for further syntactic research on SASL are provided.

Enhancing Extraction of Drug-Drug Interaction from Literature Using Neutral Candidates, Negation, and Clause Dependency.

MotivationSupervised biomedical relation extraction plays an important role in biomedical natural language processing, endeavoring to obtain the relations between biomedical entities. Drug-drug interactions, which are investigated in the present paper, are notably among the critical biomedical relations. Thus far many methods have been developed with the aim of extracting DDI relations. However, unfortunately there has been a scarcity of comprehensive studies on the effects of negation, complex sentences, clause dependency, and neutral candidates in the course of DDI extraction from biomedical articles.ResultsOur study proposes clause dependency features and a number of features for identifying neutral candidates as well as negation cues and scopes. Furthermore, our experiments indicate that the proposed features significantly improve the performance of the relation extraction task combined with other kernel methods. We characterize the contribution of each category of features and finally conclude that neutral candidate features have the most prominent role among all of the three categories.