Although negation-free languages are widely used in logic and computer science, relatively little is known about their expressive power. To address this issue we consider kinds of non-symmetric bisimulations called directed simulations, and use these to analyse the expressive power and model theory of negation-free modal and temporal languages. We first use them to obtain preservation, safety a...

We investigate how people process negation in semantically distorted and metaphoric sentences. We present three experiments in which participants judged the truth of affirmative and negative sentences that were either literal or contained semantic illusions (Erickson & Mattson, 1981) or metaphors. In all experiments, negation increases processing times; although for semantic illusions, negation...

Negation is known to vary considerably in both form and morphosyntactic function among the languages of the Arawak family (Aikhenvald 1999: 96), with even closely-related languages sometimes exhibiting negation elements with starkly different forms and functions. The purpose of this chapter is to present a typological overview of negation in Arawak languages and to develop a preliminary compara...

In this paper I provide some linguistic evidence to the thesis that responsibility judgments are normative. I present an argument from negation, since the negation of descriptive judgments is structurally different from the negation of normative judgments. In particular, the negation of responsibility judgments seem to conform to the pattern of the negation of normative judgments, thus being a ...

Though negation is unique and central to human language, it has so far received little attention in cognitive neuroscience. The goal of the present study was to investigate the contrast between affirmative and negative sentences using fMRI, focusing on two central aspects, namely, (1) a semantic difference: affirmation is upward entailing, whereas negation is downward entailing; (2) a syntactic...

In this paper, we present a system for detecting negation in English text. We address three tasks: negation cue detection, negation scope resolution and negated event identification. We pose these tasks as sequence labeling problems. For each task, we train a Conditional Random Field (CRF) model on lexical, structural, and syntactic features extracted from labeled data. The models are trained a...

Paraconsistent logics are generally considered somewhat esoteric. Moreover, someone argued that they simply not exist, because paraconsistent negations are not negations. The aim of this work is to provide some valid reasons to reject both these assumptions. Negation as finite failure (NAF) is the standard way to compute negation, used, for instance, by all the known (to me) Prolog implementati...

Many studies have shown the advantage of processing visualizable words over non-visualizables due to the associated image code. The present paper reports the case of negation in which imagery could slow down processing. Negation reverses the truth value of a proposition from false to true or vice versa. Consequently, negation works only on propositions (reversing their truth value) and cannot a...

In this article we present the two classical negations of Euclid’s Fifth Postulate (done by Lobachevski-Bolyai-Gauss, and respectively by Riemann), and in addition of these we propose a partial negation (or a degree of negation) of an axiom in geometry. The most important contribution of this article is the introduction of the degree of negation (or partial negation) of an axiom and, more gener...

Why do some negative sentences sound strange, even when they are both true and grammatical? Past work suggests that both adults (e.g., Clark & Chase, 1972) and children (e.g., Kim, 1985) find negation difficult, but context can facilitate the processing of negative sentences (e.g., Wason, 1965). We argue that the effect of context on negation is driven by general pragmatic principles rather tha...