The effects of negation on discourse structure

Abstract

In five sentence continuation studies we investigated how different forms of negation (negative quantifier, clausal negation, lexical negation) impact discourse structure in Swedish. We looked at what set of referents (the reference set for which some property holds, or the complement set, for which the property does not hold) speakers considered most noteworthy (speaker salient), and what form they used to refer to this set (reflecting its givenness status, i.e. hearer salience) in their sentence continuations. Most continuations targeted the complement set when the prompt included a negative quantifier. When negation was in the form of clausal negation, the reference set was targeted. Having a lexically negated verb in addition to the negative quantifier as subject mattered only when speakers were not prompted to make one of the sets the sentence topic. In this case, reference set continuations were also common. The conclusion is that although the types of negation convey similar negative meanings, they give rise to differences in discourse structure, and crucially the lexical properties of the predicate can influence the strong tendency of negative quantifier to focus the complement set.