Negative Sentences Research Articles

Multidimensional inhibitory signatures of sentential negation in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia.

Processing of linguistic negation has been associated to inhibitory brain mechanisms. However, no study has tapped this link via multimodal measures in patients with core inhibitory alterations, a critical approach to reveal direct neural correlates and potential disease markers. Here we examined oscillatory, neuroanatomical, and functional connectivity signatures of a recently reported Go/No-go negation task in healthy controls and behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) patients, typified by primary and generalized inhibitory disruptions. To test for specificity, we also recruited persons with Alzheimer's disease (AD), a disease involving frequent but nonprimary inhibitory deficits. In controls, negative sentences in the No-go condition distinctly involved frontocentral delta (2-3 Hz) suppression, a canonical inhibitory marker. In bvFTD patients, this modulation was selectively abolished and significantly correlated with the volume and functional connectivity of regions supporting inhibition (e.g. precentral gyrus, caudate nucleus, and cerebellum). Such canonical delta suppression was preserved in the AD group and associated with widespread anatomo-functional patterns across non-inhibitory regions. These findings suggest that negation hinges on the integrity and interaction of spatiotemporal inhibitory mechanisms. Moreover, our results reveal potential neurocognitive markers of bvFTD, opening a new agenda at the crossing of cognitive neuroscience and behavioral neurology.

Analisis Berita Pencalonan Gubernur Dan Wakil Gubernur NTT Tahun 2018 Pada Surat Kabar Victory News: Sebuah Kajian Wacana Kritis

This study aims to analyze the text, the practice of citizenship and the socio-cultural context in the news text of the election of the governor and vice governor of East Nusa Tenggara in 2018 in the Victory News newspaper. The theory used in this study is Norman Fairclough's critical discourse analysis to analyze texts, the practice of producing and consuming texts, and socio-cultural practices on texts. The method used is descriptive qualitative method. From the data analysis, conclusions can be drawn. First, the VN news text features the 'promise' vocabulary which tends to be used to weaken the pair of candidates for governor-vice-governor besides Viktory-Joss. Transitive sentences tend to be used in the headline of VJ packages while other packages tend to be intransitive sentences. The use of negative sentences and metaphors tends to be used to benefit VJ packages. The news texts used by Victory News tend to be descriptive and argumentative in nature, characterized by the use of meaningful causal conjunctions. Second, Victory News discourse tends to raise news about the campaign, vision and mission, the strength of character and background that supports the Viktory-Joss package. Victory News tends to be political, which means that the interests of the owners of these newspapers are more dominant than balanced reporting. Third, Victory News ideology is positive imaging by highlighting the VJ package so that the public positively evaluates the vision, missions, and actions taken by the package

How Many Ways are there Not to Act?

Introduction. The article offers a formal analysis of negative action sentences. The goal of the article is to define the notion of non-action, propose a classification of types of nonaction, and to describe the situations of agentive non-doing.Methodology and sources. We propose to interpret the passage from von Wright, which deals with possible interpretations of negative action sentences, as the description of types of non-action. With the help of formal tools of the logic of action, we show the difference between the supposed types of non-action as the difference between the sentences of the subject language, interpreted in different models, each of which sets specific conditions for the choice open to an agent. We offer definitions for the detected types of non-action and illustrate the differences between them with several examples.Results and discussion. We trace the embodiment of von Wright’s original ideas in modern logic of actions and then conclude the existence of a simplified interpretation of refraining in this tradition, which entailed many paradoxes when an agent refrains from everything that she does not do. We show how our analysis expands the scope of possible reactions of an agent, so that the paradox of refraining, noted by the formal and informal schools of research of this phenomenon, becomes vanishes.Conclusion. We propose to consider the list of types of non-action, the definitions of which we obtained as a result of a formal analysis of refraining, to be an exhaustive list of alternatives available to the agent in connection with any possible state of affairs in theory.

Facilitation of processing darenimo 'any/everyone' negative Japanese sentences using prosodic entrainment.

The present study examined how prosody affects Japanese speakers' processing of the polarity item darenimo 'any/everyone'. Upward (LHHH pitch) and downward (HLLL pitch) prosody for darenimo associates with negative and positive polarity, respectively. In Study 1, a corpus search showed that darenimo is more often associated with negative than positive polarity. In Study 2, subjective acceptability judgments indicated that darenimo is also more likely to be perceived as acceptable by native Japanese speakers when used with negative polarity. In line with Study 2, Study 3 showed that upward prosody with negative polarity was more accurately and quickly processed than was downward prosody with either positive or negative polarity. These three studies showed a one-sided distribution of upward prosody with negative polarity, and further indicated that only upward prosody facilitates listeners' processing of negation. Early heightened pitch of darenimo provides a cue to predict an ending negation -nai in the head-final Japanese language, resulting in faster speed and higher accuracy for the processing of negative sentences (i.e.,a facilitation effect) compared to their corresponding affirmative sentences.

Language specificity in the processing of affirmative and negative sentences.

It is agreed that understanding a negative sentence elicits additional neural responses in reversing the truth of an embedded affirmative proposition. However, this argument is challenged by previous neuroimaging studies when distinct languages are used. Therefore, we intended to explore the language specificity of affirmative and negative sentence processing in this study. We recruited a group of Chinese-English bilinguals to conduct a grammar judgment task of affirmative and negative sentences during functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning. And we kept syntactic complexity/sentence length matched in both affirmative and negative sentences. We found that negative sentences elicited more activation in the perisylvian region, which supported the 'truth reversing hypothesis' and argued the reversing process was implemented by the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. The significant language-by-sentence interaction effect in the inferior prefrontal cortex and rostral prefrontal cortex showed that sentential negation was influenced by distinctive language expression. These results demonstrated the 'truth reversing hypothesis'. Further analysis revealed the effect of language expression on the neural mechanism of sentential negation.

On the prosody of French ambiguous multiple negative sentences.

While it has long been assumed that prosody can help resolve syntactic and semantic ambiguities, empirical evidence has shown that the mapping between prosody and meaning is complex (Hirschberg & Avesani 2000; Jackendoff 1972). This paper investigates the prosody of ambiguous French sentences with multiple potentially negative terms that allow two semantically very distinct interpretations—a single negation reading involving negative concord (NC), and a double negative reading (DN) with a positive meaning reflecting a strictly compositional interpretation— with the goal to further research on the role of prosody in ambiguities by examining whether intonation can be recruited by speakers to signal distinct interpretations of these sentences to hearers. Twenty native speakers produced transitive sentences with potentially negative terms embedded in contexts designed to elicit single-negation or double-negation readings. Analysis regarding the F0 and the duration of the utterances revealed distinct prosodic profiles for the two readings, confirming previous evidence that speakers can produce characteristic acoustic cues to signal intended distinctive meanings (Kraljic & Brennan 2005; Syrett, Simon & Nisula 2014). Our results reveal that the NC readings feature a focused subject and a post-focally more compressed object, in contrast to the DN readings where both the subject and the object were independently focused. They do not relate DN to contradiction but link negative meaning with focus on French negative concord items (NCI). The paper discusses broad implications of these findings for theoretical approaches to NC and outlines further questions for the syntax-prosody interface of these constructions.

Dostoevsky and the Word “Jew”: A Quantitative Analysis of F.M. Dostoevsky’s Greatest Novels

Abstract The relationship of F.M Dostoevsky with Jews attracted the attention of numerous scholars throughout the years, many of whom attempted to grapple with the views of the great writer and their origin. In this article we will attempt to show this relationship by analyzing six of Dostoevsky’s greatest novels, written through the entirety of his career. We are analyzing these novels using Distant Reading in conjunction with Close Reading, tools that are commonly used in the field of digital humanities, which enabled us to show visually the extent of F.M. Dostoevsky’s engagement with this topic. The study poses two research questions: 1. To what extent did the writer use the more denigrating term “Zhid”? 2. Can we see a correlation between the writer’s portrayal of Jews with the definition of Anti-Semitism as it was known during his era? The obtained results show that there is clearly a correlation between the definition of anti-Semitism as it was understood at the time of Dostoevsky and the “Jew” as depicted in his novels, as the financial motif is paramount in the depiction of Jews as this is the central topic in 49% of the negative sentences in which the word “Jew” appears, with 59% of these sentences classified as stereotypes. The negative financial stereotype constitutes 32% of the entire corpus. In addition, we found the term “Zhid” is commonly used by the writer, a variation of which constitutes 75% of the total terms used to depict Jews.

Negative sentences exhibit a sustained effect in delayed verification tasks.

Negated sentences are known to be more cognitively taxing than positive ones (i.e., polarity effect). We present evidence that two factors contribute to the polarity effect in verification tasks: processing the sentence and verifying its truth value. To quantify the relative contribution of each, we used a delayed verification task. The results show that even when participants are given a considerable amount of time for processing the sentence prior to verification, the polarity effect is not entirely eliminated. We suggest that this sustained effect stems from a retained negation-containing representation in working memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

THE SYNTAX OF SENTENTIAL NEGATION IN STANDARD ARABIC AND JAZANI DIALECT

Negation in Standard Arabic (SA) and colloquial Arabic dialects is expressed in diverse ways that have led to its being studied extensively by many linguists (e.g., Al-Shurafa & Al-momani 2011; Al-tamari 2001; Benmamoun 2000; Eid 1991; Harrama 1983). This paper highlights the varied syntactic structures of sentential negation in SA and Jazani dialect. The negative marker maa is from SA, while ʃ developed from the word ʃayʔ, which means ‘thing’ (Ouhalla 2002). Benmamoun (2000) stated that ʃ seems to have evolved relatively recently to reinforce the negative maa. This two-negation elements pattern maa and -ʃ do not exist in SA.

Exploring Transformer-Based Learning for Negation Detection in Biomedical Texts

NLP techniques have been widely adopted in the biomedical domain to perform various text-analytics tasks, such as searching biomedical literature and extracting and deriving new knowledge from biomedical data. One type of biomedical data is clinical texts (e.g., clinical cases and medical records), which typically contain physicians’ notes about a patient’s health, including previous medical history (symptoms, diseases, lab exams, treatments, etc.), as every visit to the hospital leads to the addition of more information to the patient’s record. Another type of biomedical data is biological articles, which typically discuss and explore a certain phenomenon, such as the behavior of biological entities (e.g., genetic relations and interactions among them) and the roles of specific biological processes in causing diseases (e.g., how genetic amplification can cause tumorous diseases). For both types of biomedical data, negation detection is an essential analytics task that can be applied to identify negated contexts in biomedical text (e.g., detecting the presence of a statement establishing that a patient does not have/fit a certain clinical condition or detecting statements that indicate the nonexistence of certain relations among biological entities). This task has been addressed in prior work by considering a variety of approaches such as rule-based systems, conventional machine-learning classifiers, and deep learning approaches. In this work, we propose applying transformer-based learning for negation detection in biomedical texts. We use pre-trained BERT and other similar models (such as ALBERT, XLNet, and ELECTRA) to address two negation-detection subtasks: negation sentence identification and negation scope recognition. We evaluated our approach using the BioScope corpus and relying on measures such as accuracy, precision, recall, F1, and percentage of correct scopes (PCS). Our findings show the potential of transformer-based learning for negation detection, reaching an accuracy of 99% for negation identification and a PCS of 95% for negation scope recognition.

Hamza-ul-Izala

This type of Hamza also popular as “Hamza-ul-Salb” & “Hamza-ul-Nafi” among the Arab Linguists is one of the Wonders of the Arabic Language. Despite that the particles of Negation e.g. (ما) and (لا) are very clearly used in Arabic Language to make a Negative Sentence, but the Arab Linguists used another style – which is very simple and effective in its own self – by introducing Hamza on a verb which makes its meaning opposite to the original meaning of the trilateral verb (i.e. before entering the Hamza).Thus Hamza-ul-Izala is the Hamza that enters on some verbs in Arabic Language & makes its meaning opposite to the original meaning of the verb. It has many examples, including:(قَسَطَ): to act unjustly(أَقْسَطَ): to act justly, in fairness, equitably(مُقْسِط): just, fair(شكا) : to complain of something(أشكا): to resolve one’s complaint(عقل): to hobble the camel with the عقال, to intern, confine(أعقل): to free the camel from عقال(عجم): to be obscure, incomprehensible, unintelligent, to speakincorrect Arabic(أعجم): to make the speech clear, remove the imbiguity(مُعْجَم) Dictionary, Lexicon

Air Pollution and Media Slant: Evidence from Chinese Corporate News

ABSTRACT This paper examines the impact of air pollution on the media slant of publicly listed firms in China. Using a large panel of air quality and media data at the city level, we find that lower air quality generally leads to a more negative media slant. When the air quality falls from lightly polluted to heavily polluted, the number of negative sentences in a news article increases by about 1%. Our subsample analysis shows that the effect of air pollution on media slant is similar for news articles covering large and small firms, SOE and non-SOE firms and for official and non-official newspaper articles. Furthermore, the effect of air pollution on media slant is stronger for firms in heavy polluting industries. These results suggest that air pollution affects media slant.

Expletive negation in exclamatives – Evidence from Hungarian

Abstract This paper examines expletive negation in root clauses (surprise negation sentences and wh-exclamatives) in Hungarian. We argue that Hungarian has three distinct negation positions, each corresponding to a truth-reversal operation on a different level. When the negator nem ‘no’ is merged in the CP layer (in the head position of the Speaker Deixis Phrase), this yields surprise negation sentences, corresponding to negation at the level of presuppositions (expletive negation). The negator being merged as the head of NegP within the extended TP yields standard negation (at the propositional level). In wh-exclamatives, the negator is head-adjoined to T0, which results in negation at the level of implicatures (expletive negation). In addition to pointing out this mapping between syntactic position and semantic-pragmatic interpretation, we also argue that the data from Hungarian present a strong case against a raising analysis of expletive negation.

A Review on Fact Extraction and Verification

We study the fact-checking problem, which aims to identify the veracity of a given claim. Specifically, we focus on the task of Fact Extraction and VERification (FEVER) and its accompanied dataset. The task consists of the subtasks of retrieving the relevant documents (and sentences) from Wikipedia and validating whether the information in the documents supports or refutes a given claim. This task is essential and can be the building block of applications such as fake news detection and medical claim verification. In this article, we aim at a better understanding of the challenges of the task by presenting the literature in a structured and comprehensive way. We describe the proposed methods by analyzing the technical perspectives of the different approaches and discussing the performance results on the FEVER dataset, which is the most well-studied and formally structured dataset on the fact extraction and verification task. We also conduct the largest experimental study to date on identifying beneficial loss functions for the sentence retrieval component. Our analysis indicates that sampling negative sentences is important for improving the performance and decreasing the computational complexity. Finally, we describe open issues and future challenges, and we motivate future research in the task.

Exhaustivity and homogeneity effects with distributive‐share markers: Experimental evidence from Serbian po

AbstractThere are two competing approaches to the semantics of distributive‐share markers: they are either universal distributive quantifiers over events or are merely event‐plurality markers. To address this debate, we present new conclusions based on novel experiments with Serbian transitive sentences in which the distributive‐share marker po was attached to the direct object. The first two experiments investigated exhaustivity effects in transitive sentences with po, while the third experiment probed homogeneity effects across three types of negative transitive sentences: with po marking the object, with the distributive‐key quantifier svaki (‘every’) in subject position, and with neither. If po is a universal quantifier, then it should enforce exhaustive distribution over a distributive key and remove homogeneity effects in negative sentences with a definite subject. If instead po is an event‐plurality marker with no universal quantificational force, then it should neither enforce exhaustive distribution nor remove homogeneity effects in negative sentences with a definite subject. We conclude that there are two populations of Serbian speakers with systematic patterns of interpretation: one population interprets po as a universal quantifier and one population interprets po as an event‐plurality marker. We conjecture that this population split might reflect an ongoing diachronic change in the semantic import of the distributive‐share marker po.

Category of negation paradigm in diachrony

The negation in logic and linguistics, negation as a grammatical category on the morphological and syntactic levels are substantiated in the article. It is concluded that in broad semantic terms negation can be expressed in morphologic and syntactic ways in natural language. On the morphological level, negative affixes paradigm and separate parts of speech are taken into consideration, while on the syntactic level the whole negative sentence that includes one or more than one negator is observed. Negation is expressed using affixes that have explicative and implicative components in their meaning. Authentic affixes preserve the semantic meaning of the words they etymologically derive from, giving the word they join to, a special shade of negation. The main source of enrichment of the negative affixes paradigm and their new meaning are affixes borrowed from other languages. The study of the category of negation on different levels in diachronic aspects can help to observe the development of particular parts of speech, which can express negation, and serve as a base for further studies of negation in the different discourses and communicative situations.

The Role of Predictability During Negation Processing in Truth-Value Judgment Tasks

In experiments investigating the processing of true and false negative sentences, it is often reported that polarity interacts with truth-value, in the sense that true sentences lead to faster reaction times than false sentences in affirmative conditions whereas the same does not hold for negative sentences. Various reasons for this difference between affirmative and negative sentences have been discussed in the literature (e.g., lexical associations, predictability, ease of comparing sentence and world). In the present study, we excluded lexical associations as a potential influencing factor. Participants saw artificial visual worlds (e.g., a white square and a black circle) and corresponding sentences (i.e., “The square/circle is (not) white”). The results showed a clear effect of truth-value for affirmative sentences (true faster than false) but not for negative sentences. This result implies that the well-known truth-value-by-polarity interaction cannot solely be due to long-term lexical associations. Additional predictability manipulations allowed us to also rule out an explanatory account that attributes the missing truth-value effect for negative sentences to low predictability. We also discuss the viability of an informativeness account.

Het interesseert me geen ene je-weet-wel – Minimaliserende strategieën in het hedendaagse Nederlandse Nederlands

This paper focuses on minimizing strategies in present-day Netherlandic Dutch. The minimizing construction under investigation consists of (1) an element of negation (geen); (2) a predicate and (3) a minimizer, a noun that denotes a small quantity and that is used to reinforce sentential negation (e.g. geen woord begrijpen ‘to understand not a word’). First, we situate the minimizing construction in relation to other, pragmatic minimizing strategies. Then, we provide a semantic typology of the minimizers in our dataset. Moreover, we give an overview of the different strategies that are available to extend the slot of the minimizer, such as analogical and context-based extensions. This shows the productivity (in terms of lexical scope) of the minimizing construction.

Interspeaker variation in the negated perfective aspect of Zamboanga Chavacano

Framed from four perspectives, (1) Schütze & Curbach (2019), grammaticality judgment and linguistic methodology; (2) Mcwhorter’s (2011), description of the complexity of creoles as flourishing over time from an original state; (3) Steinkruger (2013), explanation of negated sentences in the perfective aspect; and (4) Lee (2005), delineation of native speakers of a language, this research paper looked into the combination of the negator nohay and the perfective aspect markers ya and yan (ya man) in the sentence. A negated sentence with a perfective aspect is a structure that seems to be accepted by some native speakers of Chavacano (or Chabacano) but rejected by others. In the literature, only Steinkruger (2013), describes the permissibility of the forenamed combination in the syntactic structure of Chavacano. It was hypothesized that such a combination is acceptable in Chavacano and that there is an interspeaker variation pertinent to its acceptability. To confirm these hypotheses, data were collected via grammaticality judgment from 105 native Chavacano speakers and another set of data were collected via interview from 10 native speakers of Chavacano for corroborative purposes.

A Contrastive Study of the Co-occurrence of the Augmented, Unaugmented and Iterative forms in -σκ- in Iliad 24

This article investigates the co-occurrence of iterative forms in -σκ-, unaugmented and augmented verb forms in Iliad 24. I first give an in-depth overview of the scholarship on the origin (§ 2) and meaning (§ 3) of the suffix. Second, I describe how I determine my corpus of metrically secure forms (§ 4). As the transmission of the text is not always secure, I restrict myself to those forms where the presence or absence of the augment is guaranteed by the metre. Third, I discuss in great length the previous scholarship on the origin and meaning of the augment (§ 5), focusing particularly on the theories by Lazzeroni and Willi, before proceeding to the actual analysis of the passages in Book 24 where iterative forms, unaugmented and augmented forms co-occur, including the forms ἔσκε and ἦ(ε)ν. I argue (§ 6 and § 7) that (a) the iterative suffix marks repeated actions and is different from the unaugmented forms without suffix, (b) that the forms with suffix can be used to contrast the repeated actions of one (group of) protagonist(s) with that of the other(s), (c) the augmented forms convey emphasis and highlighting and (d) the unaugmented forms describe the background and scene setting or appear in negated sentences that refer to past actions that never occurred and can never happen anymore in the future. At the end I also mention the exceptions to the rules.