Pragmatics of negation 1 Running head : PRAGMATICS OF NEGATION
نویسندگان
چکیده
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, but in more recent work, supportive contexts mitigate the processing costs of negation, suggesting a pragmatic explanation. We make a strong test of this pragmatic hypothesis by directly comparing speakers and listeners. Speakers produce negative sentences more often when they are both relevant and informative. Listeners in turn are fastest to respond to sentences that they expect speakers to produce. Since negative sentences are only difficult in contexts when they are unlikely to be produced, representing negation is likely less difficult than previously supposed.
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The pragmatics of negation across contexts
Why do some negative sentences sound strange, even when they are both true and grammatical? We explore the pragmatics of negation by examining adults’ explicit felicity judgments of negative sentences in context. In Experiment 1, we found that a pragmatically supportive context elicited higher felicity ratings for negative sentences, and that negative sentences expressing nonexistence were rate...
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