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.
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.
Verb aspects in the form of -teiru in Japanese is a category that is still common to be discussed as the result of meaning classification that is prompted. This article tries to explore the aspect ...relations in -teiru form toward negation to see the change of meaning that is produced. This way, the writer recommends the aspects classification of -teiru when it is present with a negation constituent in clause construction. The object of this research is the verb form -teiru in Japanese, the data are taken from Konotoha corpus in collecting the data, the writer used several keywords including -teiru, -teinai, -teita, -teinakatta, -teimasu, -teimasen, -teimashita, and -teimasendeshita. The aspect analysis of -teiru in this research refers to a theory that is explained by Nitta (1995) who classified the Japanese -teiru meaning in four categories, including: ugoki no saichuu ‘continuity of action’, kekkajoutai no jizoku ‘continuity of result state’, kurikaeshiteki jizoku ‘repeated continuity’, and keiken-kiroku ‘experience-note/memory’. Based on the data analysis, it shows that the presence of negation in both past and non-past can generate -teiru form which is later classified into two, they are perfective and imperfective. Those that are categorized as perfective aspect are the presence of negation on aspect meaning of -teiru within category kekkajoutai no jizoku. While the imperfective aspect occurs during the presence of negation within categories ugoki no saichuu, kurikaeshiteki jizoku, and keiken-kiroku.
In this paper, I look at how context-dependent inferences can enrich the meaning of non-factual before (‘avant que’) clauses in French. My proposal is that, in a sentence like ‘before p, q’, the ...connective may receive two pragmatically enriched readings: (i) an apprehensive reading, when the agent responsible for q has the goal of avoiding p (after Anderbois & Dabkowski (2020)); (ii) a frustrative reading, when it is contrary to the expectations of the agent responsible for q that p. Going further, I address the question of expletive negation in avant que clauses, arguing that expletive negation puts emphasis on the connective’s invited inferences of negative (teleological or doxastic) preference. Finally, I generalize the account to other contexts where expletive negation occurs in French.
Expletive Negation is widespread in human languages. Although many semantic, pragmatic and syntactic hypotheses about it have been advanced, it still remains puzzling. Two questions, particularly, ...need to be faced: (i) what are the contexts, mainly syntactic, where negation receives its vacuous interpretation? (ii) Is EN a phenomenon grammatically distinct from standard negation or are they the same one? In this article I will provide empirical and theoretical arguments to show that EN derives from a particular syntactic configuration by investigating a case of Italian EN, i.e. Surprise Negation Sentences. More specifically, I will propose that the Italian negative marker “
non
” (“not”) has a twofold interpretation encoded in syntax: (i) when it is merged in the TP-area during the v*P-phase, it gives the standard negative interpretation reversing the truth-value conditions of a sentence; (ii) when it is merged in the CP domain and the v*P-phase is already closed, it gives the expletive interpretation shown in Snegs. From this point of view, the expletive reading of negation is just a reflex of the syntactic context in which negation is introduced.
This paper deals with the Italian presuppositional negation marker mica. This particle can surface differently in the negative circuit, e.g. either in a clause-initial or a clause-internal position. ...However, depending on its position, different types of focus and pragmatic requirements are found. We consider the initial mica as an instance of corrective focus and the clause-internal one as encoding a more generic contrastive focus. We show that this is in line with the recent findings on focus typology of Italian.
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