•The Mixtec languages offer a complex illustration of the ‘Negative Existential Cycle’.•Negative indefinite pronouns may derive from negative existential clauses.•Negative existential indefinites, ...though rare, are found in Mixtec languages.
In Mixtec scholarship one finds hesitant claims that Mixtec standard negators (‘not’) derive from or are related to existential ones (‘there is not’). The data are complex, not least because there are several standard and existential negators. This paper confirms these claims, with reference to current typological theorizing on the “Negative Existential Cycle” and provides as full an account as possible of the effect of this cycle in Mixtec. The study also argues that the Mixtec languages show evidence for introducing a “Negative Existential Indefiniteness Cycle”. This process makes negative indefinite pronouns (like ‘nobody’) out of negative existential constructions (like ‘not exists somebody’), of which each component gets lost at the clausal level and may reappear.
The processing of negation is typically regarded as one of the most demanding cognitive processes as it often involves the reversal of input information. As negation is also regarded as a core ...linguistic process, to date, investigations of negation have typically been linguistic in nature. However, negation is a standard operator also within non-linguistic domains. For example, traffic signs often use negation to indicate a prohibition of specific actions (e.g., no left turn). In the current study, we investigate whether processing difficulties that are typically reported within the linguistic domain generalize to pictorial negation. Across two experiments, linguistic negation and pictorial negation were directly compared to their affirmative counterparts. In line with the literature, the results show that there is a general processing benefit for pictorial input. Most interestingly, the core process of negation also benefits from the pictorial input. Specifically, the processing difficulty in pictorial negation compared to affirmation is less pronounced than within the linguistic domain, especially concerning error rates. In the current experiments, pictorial negation did not result in increased error rates compared to the affirmative condition. Overall, the current results suggest that negation in pictorial conditions also results in a slowing of information processing. However, the use of pictorial negation can ease processing difficulty over linguistic negation.
•Investigation whether specific cognitive processes benefit from specific formats•Investigation of negation across linguistic and pictorial input format•Linguistic and pictorial negation are difficult to process.•Pictorial negation less error prone than a linguistic negation•Ironic effects of negation less pronounced for pictorial input
The present study investigates the diachronic development of the bipartite negative construction haa ... may in Thai, aiming to account for its syntactic and semantic peculiarity. Based on the ...historical data from the Sukhothai period to Modern Thai, I suggest that the development of haa ... may construction relates to the grammaticalization of the expression haa NP mi?? day 'fail to find something'. From around the mid-14th century, haa NP mi?? day came to gain a new function as an irregular negative existential construction under the pressure of the recession of the anterior negative existential form bcc mii 'not have, not exist'. This function is especially prominent in the 17th century during which the old negator bcc shows a continuous decrease in the frequency of use and the newer negator may was not widely used. When the newer negative existential form may mii emerged around the early 18th century and eventually prevailed over haa NP mi?? day in the 19th and 20th centuries, haa NP mi?? day gradually lost its function as a negative existential form but survived its evolution into a negative adverbial construction through a syntagmatic change (from haa NP to haa VP), accompanied by a phonetic reduction (from haa ... mi?? day to haa ... may) and a semantic reinterpretation(from 'fail to find something or not exist, not have' to 'not VP as one thought'). Keywords: Thai, bipartite negation, grammaticalization ISO 639-3 codes: tha
We argue that under the stable model semantics default negation can be read as explicit negation with update. We show that dynamic logic programming which is based on default negation, even in the ...heads, can be interpreted in a variant of updates with explicit negation only. As corollaries, we get an easy description of default negation in generalized and normal logic programming where initially negated literals are updated. These results are discussed with respect to the understanding of negation in logic.
Negation and infinity Trzęsicki, Kazimierz
Studies in logic, grammar and rhetoric : the Journal of University of Bialystok,
06/2018, Letnik:
54, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Infinity and negation are in various relations and interdependencies one to another. The analysis of negation and infinity aims to better understanding them. Semantical, syntactical, and pragmatic ...issues will be considered.
Human judgments of similarity and difference are sometimes asymmetrical, with the former being more sensitive than the latter to relational overlap, but the theoretical basis for this asymmetry ...remains unclear. We test an explanation based on the type of information used to make these judgments (relations versus features) and the comparison process itself (similarity versus difference). We propose that asymmetries arise from two aspects of cognitive complexity that impact judgments of similarity and difference: processing relations between entities is more cognitively demanding than processing features of individual entities, and comparisons assessing difference are more cognitively complex than those assessing similarity. In Experiment 1 we tested this hypothesis for both verbal comparisons between word pairs, and visual comparisons between sets of geometric shapes. Participants were asked to select one of two options that was either more similar to or more different from a standard. On unambiguous trials, one option was unambiguously more similar to the standard; on ambiguous trials, one option was more featurally similar to the standard, whereas the other was more relationally similar. Given the higher cognitive complexity of processing relations and of assessing difference, we predicted that detecting relational difference would be particularly demanding. We found that participants (1) had more difficulty detecting relational difference than they did relational similarity on unambiguous trials, and (2) tended to emphasize relational information more when judging similarity than when judging difference on ambiguous trials. The latter finding was replicated using more complex story stimuli (Experiment 2). We showed that this pattern can be captured by a computational model of comparison that weights relational information more heavily for similarity than for difference judgments.
Negation as a universal feature of human language is used effortlessly in everyday communication. However, experimental research has shown that the comprehension of negated sentences seems to require ...additional cognitive resources compared to affirmative sentences. Many studies investigating the processing of negation report longer reading and reaction times for negative compared to affirmative sentences and many studies report a Polarity by Truth interaction: false affirmative sentences lead to longer response times and larger N400 event-related potentials (ERPs) than true affirmative sentences, whereas the pattern is reversed for negative sentences where it is the true sentence that elicits longer reaction times and higher N400 ERPs compared to false negative sentences. These interactions have been discussed in the light of lexical associations, predictability, and the need to construct two subsequent mental representations. Furthermore, recent studies have shown that the comprehension of negated sentences seems to make use of neural resources that are typically involved in cognitive control and inhibitory mechanisms. As both processes have been associated with two different and temporally overlapping ERP components (the N400 and the P300), we focus on studies with high temporal resolution. We discuss linguistic aspects of negation, such as semantic similarity and contextual invariance of negation. We furthermore discuss the role of the verb as well as the position of the negative marker with respect to the verb, and their respective relevance for predictive and inhibitory mechanisms in negated sentences.
Negation operation is important in intelligent information processing. Different existing arithmetic negation, an exponential negation is presented in this paper. The new negation can be seen as a ...kind of geometry negation. Some basic properties of the proposed negation are investigated, and we find that the fix point is the uniform probability distribution, which reaches the maximum entropy. The proposed exponential negation is an entropy increase operation, and all the probability distributions will converge to the uniform distribution after multiple negation iterations. The convergence speed of the proposed negation is also faster than the existed negation. The number of iterations of convergence is inversely proportional to the number of elements in the distribution. Some numerical examples are used to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed negation.
This paper explores a famous puzzle about English positive polar questions introduced by Buring and Gunlogson 2000: while in many contexts they seem to indicate nothing whatsoever about what the ...speaker takes for granted or thinks likely, in contexts that provide evidence against the content proposition of the question, they are infelicitous. This pattern, which I term the "evidence asymmetry", has been particularly troubling for standard accounts of polar questions that treat the positive and negative answers on par with each other. However, given that polar questions are felicitous in neutral contexts, it doesn't have an easy solution: polar questions in general don't seem to place constraints on evidence or context. I propose that polar questions have a fairly weak presupposition requiring just the content alternative to be possible (but say nothing about its negation), and (building on Trinh 2014) that this together with Maximize Presupposition-based reasoning about competitor questions (specifically"or not" alternative questions) can derive the evidence asymmetry. This account does not require the covert evidential marker of Trinh 2014, and essentially proposes that the evidence asymmetry follows from norms for English polar questions.
In this paper, we present SFU Review
SP
-NEG, the first Spanish corpus annotated with negation with a wide coverage freely available. We describe the methodology applied in the annotation of the ...corpus including the tagset, the linguistic criteria and the inter-annotator agreement tests. We also include a complete typology of negation patterns in Spanish. This typology has the advantage that it is easy to express in terms of a tagset for corpus annotation: the types are clearly defined, which avoids ambiguity in the annotation process, and they provide wide coverage (i.e. they resolved all the cases occurring in the corpus). We use the SFU Review
SP
as a base in order to make the annotations. The corpus consists of 400 reviews, 221,866 words and 9455 sentences, out of which 3022 sentences contain at least one negation structure.
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