Pragmatics and negative sentence processing

Negation is a universal phenomenon in human communication. All natural languages have negation, yet it seems to be absent in animal communication systems (S Altmann, 1967). We use negation frequently for a wide range of purposes, including rejection, denial and talking about non-existence. According to the Oxford English Corpus, “not” is the 13 most frequently used word in the English language. If we look at the combined frequency of “not” and “no”, negation is in the top 10 list. Negation enables us to entertain the truth value of a proposition, which is one of the central aspects of language use (Kant, 1787). It has long been of interest to logicians and philosophers, and relatively recently of psycholinguists and pragmatists. In terms of the processing of negation, psycholinguistics studies have shown two effects that call for an explanation: the first is the asymmetry between its frequent use in natural language and its apparent processing costs often reported in psycholinguistics studies; the second is the finding that in early stages of processing, negation seems to be ignored and attention seems to be focused on its positive argument. In terms of pragmatic functions, it’s been shown that despite its simple semantic meaning, negation interacts with context to produce rich pragmatic effects. Both negation processing and its pragmatic functions present puzzles that cannot be explained by its semantic function.