The Processing of Negation and Polarity: An Overview

Negation is a universal component of human language; polarity sensitivity (i.e., lexical distributional constraints in relation to negation) is arguably so while being pervasive across languages. Negation has long been a field of inquiry in psychological theories and experiments of reasoning, which inspired many follow-up studies of negation and negation-related phenomena in psycholinguistics. In generative theoretical linguistics, negation and polarity sensitivity have been extensively studied, as the related phenomena are situated at the interfaces of syntax, semantics and pragmatics, and are thus extremely revealing about the architecture of grammar. With the now long tradition of research on negation and polarity in psychology and psycholinguistics, and the emerging field of experimental semantics and pragmatics, a multitude of interests and experimental paradigms have emerged which call for re-evaluations and further development and integration. This special issue contains a collection of 16 research articles on the processing of negation and negation-related phenomena including polarity items, questions, conditionals, and irony, using a combination of behavioral (e.g., rating, reading, eye-tracking and sentence completion) and neuroimaging techniques (e.g., EEG). They showcase the processing of negation and polarity with or without context, in various languages and across different populations (adults, typically developing and ADHD children). The integration of multiple theoretical and empirical perspectives in this collection provides new insights, methodological advances and directions for future research.

Minimizer negative polarity items in non-negative contexts

Minimizer strong NPIs such as ˋˋlift a finger'' are known to be more restricted in their occurrence than weak NPIs like ˋˋever''. Sedivy 1990 points to contexts with a ˋˋnegative side message'' in which ˋˋlift a finger'' can occur but ˋˋever'' cannot. The paper provides a short overview over the relevant contexts and proposes an extension of a representational theory of NPI licensing with the following components: First, an utterance content is introduced that enriches the primary truth-conditional content by conventional implicatures and generalized conversational implicatures. Second, ˋˋever''-type NPIs can be licensed by weak NPI licensors, but only in the primary truth-conditional meaning of an utterance. ˋˋLift-a-finger''-type NPIs can only be licensed in the scope of negation, but the licensing can be checked at the representation of the enriched meaning of an utterance.

Sentiment Analysis of Imran Khan’s Tweets

In the recent past, sentiment analysis has been an area of interests of psychologists, sociologists, neurologists, computer scientists, and linguists including corpus linguists and computational linguists. Interdisciplinary approaches to researching various issues especially the analysis of social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are becoming popular nowadays. The availability of data on social media has made it easier to analyse the opinion or sentiments of its users. Analysis of these sentiments could reveal the face of users and it could help in various decision-making processes. Sentiment analysis is a system of knowing polarity (positive, negative, and neutral) in discourse. Moreover, sentiments can enable and disable certain functions of discourse and can divert the attention of the audience from important to a less important issue or otherwise, hence, there is a need to analyse the sentiments. In this research, sentiments (Polarity) of Imran Khan’s tweets are analysed with the help of R studio. Data for this study is collected from Imran Khan’s one-year’s tweets, tweeted from 1st January 2018 to 20th November 2018. Later we saved the data in. csv files. The results of the polarity check revealed that he has used all three types of sentiments that is positive, negative, and neutral. However, he mostly used neutral or free polarity items (FPIs) that is 67.41% in his tweets. Among positive and negative polarity items the number of negative polarity items (NPIs) is higher that is 23.21% as compared to positive polarity items (PPIs) which are only 9.40%. The manual analysis of results revealed that only software is not enough and there is a need to check the accuracy of the results manually. The use of negative polarity/negative face reveals that he tries to be independent and autonomous in his decisions (Goffman, 1967). The use of positive polarity items shows he tries to show his positive face to others. Moreover, sentiment analysis demonstrates the presence of themes propagated through the use of various lexical items.

On the Acquisition of Polarity Items: 11- to 12-Year-Olds' Comprehension of German NPIs and PPIs

Existing work on the acquisition of polarity-sensitive expressions (PSIs) suggests that children show an early sensitivity to the restricted distribution of negative polarity items (NPIs), but may be delayed in the acquisition of positive polarity items (PPIs). However, past studies primarily targeted PSIs that are highly frequent in children’s language input. In this paper, we report an experimental investigation on children’s comprehension of two NPIs and two PPIs in German. Based on corpus data indicating that the four tested PSIs are present in child-directed speech but rare in young children’s utterances, we conducted an auditory rating task with adults and 11- to 12-year-old children. The results demonstrate that, even at 11–12 years of age, children do not yet show a completely target-like comprehension of the investigated PSIs. While they are adult-like in their responses to one of the tested NPIs, their responses did not demonstrate a categorical distinction between licensed and unlicensed PSI uses for the other tested expressions. The effect was led by a higher acceptance of sentences containing unlicensed PSIs, indicating a lack of awareness for their distributional restrictions. The results of our study pose new questions for the developmental time scale of the acquisition of polarity items.

The interpretation of disjunction in VP ellipsis: The case of Mandarin Chinese

It has long been noted that verb phrase (VP) ellipsis cancels the polarity sensitivity of the English Positive Polarity Items (PPIs). In recent work, it has been proposed that words for disjunction are governed by a parameter. On one value of the parameter, disjunction is a PPI for adult speakers of many languages including Mandarin Chinese. On the other value, disjunction is interpreted in situ. It has also been proposed that child language learners, across languages, initially interpret disjunction in situ, not as a PPI. Taken together, these proposals predict that child and adult speakers of Mandarin will assign the same interpretation to disjunction in sentences with VP ellipsis, but will assign a different interpretation in sentences without VP ellipsis. This study assessed these predictions. In sentences with a full VP, the adult participants analyzed disjunction as a PPI, but they interpreted disjunction in situ in sentences with VP ellipsis. The child participants interpreted disjunction in situ in sentences of both kinds. Together, the findings support the recent proposal that disjunction is governed by a lexical parameter, with a default setting.

Processing Non-at-Issue Meanings of Conditional Connectives: The wenn/falls Contrast in German

Logical connectives in natural language pose challenges to truth-conditional semantics due to pragmatics and gradience in their meaning. This paper reports on a case study of the conditional connectives (CCs) wenn/falls ‘if/when, if/in case’ in German. Using distributional evidence, I argue that wenn and falls differ in lexical pragmatics: They express different degrees of speaker commitment (i.e., credence) toward the modified antecedent proposition at the non-at-issue dimension. This contrast can be modeled using the speaker commitment scale (Giannakidou and Mari, 2016), i.e., More committed<WENN p, FALLS p>Less committed. Four experiments are reported which tested the wenn/falls contrast, as well as the summary of an additional one from Liu (2019). Experiment 1 tested the naturalness of sentences containing the CCs (wenn or falls) and conditional antecedents with varying degrees of likelihood (very likely/likely/unlikely). The starting prediction was that falls might be degraded in combination with very likely and likely events in comparison to the other conditions, which was not borne out. Experiment 2 used the forced lexical choice paradigm, testing the choice between wenn and falls in the doxastic agent’s conditional thought, depending on their belief or disbelief in the antecedent. The finding was that subjects chose falls significantly more often than wenn in the disbelief-context, and vice versa in the belief-context. Experiment 3 tested the naturalness of sentences with CCs and an additional relative clause conveying the speaker’s belief or disbelief in the antecedent. An interaction was found: While in the belief-context, wenn was rated more natural than falls, the reverse pattern was found in the disbelief-context. While the results are mixed, the combination of the findings in Experiment 2, Experiment 3 and that of Experiment 4a from Liu (2019) that falls led to lower speaker commitment ratings than wenn, provide evidence for the CC scale. Experiment 4b tested the interaction between two speaker commitment scales, namely, one of connectives (including weil ‘because’ and wenn/falls) and the other of adverbs (factive vs. non-factive, Liu, 2012). While factive and non-factive adverbs were rated equally natural for the factive causal connective, non-factive adverbs were preferred over factive ones by both CCs, with no difference between wenn and falls. This is discussed together with the result in Liu (2019), where the wenn/falls difference occurred in the absence of negative polarity items (NPIs), but disappeared in the presence of NPIs. This raises further questions on how different speaker commitment scales interact and why.

The Diverse Landscape of Negative Polarity Items: On the Use of German NPIs as Experimental Diagnostics

The goal of this study is to provide better empirical insight into the licensing conditions of a large set of NPIs in German so that they can be used as reliable diagnostics in future research on negation-related phenomena. Experiment 1 tests the acceptability of 60 NPIs under semantic operators that are expected to license superstrong, strong, weak, and nonveridicality-licensed NPIs, respectively: antimorphic (not), anti-additive (no), downward entailing (hardly), nonveridical (maybe, question). Controls were positive assertions. Cluster analysis revealed seven clusters of NPIs, some of which confirm the licensing categorization from the literature (superstrong and weak NPIs). Other clusters show unclear patterns (overall high or medium ratings) and require further scrutiny in future research. One cluster showed high acceptability ratings only with the antimorphic and the question operator. Experiment 2 tested whether the source of this unexpected distribution was a rhetorical interpretation of the questions. Results suggest that rhetoricity was not the sole source. Overall, the results show gradual rather than categorical differences in acceptability, with higher acceptability corresponding to stronger negativity. The paper provides the detailed results for the individual NPIs as a preliminary normed acceptability index.

PSIs with Head-Like Properties

This chapter discusses two main issues that arise from PSIs (polarity-sensitive items) with head-like properties. These PSIs seem to be outside the (immediate) domain of their licensor. The first issue is how these PSIs are licensed in syntax and how a unified analysis can handle their distribution. The author argues that these PSIs are adverbial phrases that do not project a clausal projection and that negation licenses these PSIs either in Spec-NegP or under c-command. This unified analysis does not appeal to the problematic head–complement relation as a putative licensing configuration. Another issue that arises from these NPIs (negative polarity items) with head-like properties is their ability to host clitics with accusative and genitive case marking. This issue raises interesting questions pertaining to case theory and dependent case licensing. The author argues that negation licenses the puzzling accusative case of the pronominal complement, a conclusion with far-reaching implications to dependent case licensing in natural language.

Licensing Negative Polarity Items

This chapter concerns the role that syntax plays in licensing NPIs (negative polarity items). Scholars have argued for a semantic approach to characterizing the unifying properties of the wide range of licensors, such as negation, disjunction, interrogation, and subjunctives, licensors that all share the semantic notion of nonveridicality. The author extends this approach to Arabic NPIs in this chapter but also argues that syntax is heavily involved in licensing these items. In particular, the role of the categorial status, syntactic configurations, and syntactic processes such as movement in licensing NPIs are discussed. The author argues for a unified analysis with a minimal set of basic syntactic operations such as Merge and Move, and licensing configurations of c-command and Spec-Head (specifier-head). The analysis captures the true nature of perceived mutual exclusivity between NPIs and the enclitic negative marker as an epiphenomenon of the availability of multiple loci for negation.