Open AccessOn the negativity of negation
Author(s) -
Christopher Potts
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
proceedings from semantics and linguistic theory
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2163-5951
pISSN - 2163-5943
DOI - 10.3765/salt.v0i20.2565
Subject(s) - negation , negativity effect , pragmatics , polarity (international relations) , linguistics , context (archaeology) , computer science , natural language processing , natural (archaeology) , natural language , psychology , artificial intelligence , cognitive psychology , philosophy , history , genetics , archaeology , biology , cell
Natural language negation is persistently negative in the pragmatic sense, and emphatic and attenuating negative polarity items modulate this effect in systematic ways. I use large corpora of informal texts with meta-data approximating features of the context to characterize this pragmatic negativity, and I attempt to explain it in terms of the ways in which negative sentences engage the questions under discussion. The discussion highlights some of the ways in which quantitative corpus methods can be used to achieve novel results in linguistic pragmatics.