{"id":64514,"date":"2024-06-11T21:09:04","date_gmt":"2024-06-12T02:09:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=64514"},"modified":"2024-06-11T21:09:04","modified_gmt":"2024-06-12T02:09:04","slug":"not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=64514","title":{"rendered":"Not"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lately I've been seeing greater use of this kind of sentence structure:\u00a0 \"He is an awesome hero — not\".\u00a0 And (mis)negation has always been a favorite topic for discussion on Language Log.\u00a0 Consequently, I'm calling to your attention two recent publications on \"not\".<\/p>\r\n

\"'Not' in the Brain and Behavior.\" Cas W. Coopmans, Anna Mai, Andrea E. Martin, PLOS Biology<\/i> 22, no. 5 (May 31, 2024): e3002656.<\/p>\r\n

Negation is key for cognition but has no physical basis, raising questions about its neural origins. A new study in PLOS Biology<\/em> on the negation of scalar adjectives shows that negation acts in part by altering the response to the adjective it negates.<\/p>\r\n

https:\/\/journals.plos.org\/plosbiology\/article?id=10.1371\/journal.pbio.3002656<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n

Language fundamentally abstracts from what is observable in the environment, and it does so often in ways that are difficult to see without careful analysis. Consider a child annoying their sibling by holding their finger very close to the sibling\u2019s arm. If asked what they were doing, the child would likely say, \u201cI\u2019m not touching them.\u201d Here, the distinction between the physical environment and the abstraction of negation is thrown into relief. Although \u201cnot touching\u201d is consistent with the situation, \u201cnot touching\u201d is not literally what one observes because an absence is definitionally something that is not there. The sibling\u2019s annoyance speaks to the actual situation: A finger is very close to their arm. This kind of scenario illustrates how natural language negation is truly a product of the human brain, abstracting away from physical conditions in the world.<\/p>\r\n

…<\/p>\r\n

<\/p>\r\n

\"Negation Mitigates Rather than Inverts the Neural Representations of Adjectives.\" Arianna Zuanazzi, Pablo Ripoll\u00e9s, Wy Ming Lin, Laura Gwilliams, Jean-R\u00e9mi King, David Poeppel, PLOS Biology<\/i> 22, no. 5 (May 30, 2024): e3002622.<\/p>\r\n

https:\/\/journals.plos.org\/plosbiology\/article?id=10.1371\/journal.pbio.3002622<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n

Abstract<\/b>

Combinatoric linguistic operations underpin human language processes, but how meaning is composed and refined in the mind of the reader is not well understood. We address this puzzle by exploiting the ubiquitous function of negation. We track the online effects of negation (\u201cnot\u201d) and intensifiers (\u201creally\u201d) on the representation of scalar adjectives (e.g., \u201cgood\u201d) in parametrically designed behavioral and neurophysiological (MEG) experiments. The behavioral data show that participants first interpret negated adjectives as affirmative and later modify their interpretation towards, but never exactly as, the opposite meaning. Decoding analyses of neural activity further reveal significant above chance decoding accuracy for negated adjectives within 600 ms from adjective onset, suggesting that negation does not invert the representation of adjectives (i.e., \u201cnot bad\u201d represented as \u201cgood\u201d); furthermore, decoding accuracy for negated adjectives is found to be significantly lower than that for affirmative adjectives. Overall, these results suggest that negation mitigates rather than inverts the neural representations of adjectives. This putative suppression mechanism of negation is supported by increased synchronization of beta-band neural activity in sensorimotor areas. The analysis of negation provides a steppingstone to understand how the human brain represents changes of meaning over time.<\/p>\r\n

Psycholinguists are linguists too, are they not?<\/p>\r\n

 <\/p>\r\n

Selected readings<\/b><\/p>\r\n