Psychological Aspects of Pragmatics of Negation

The topic of this thesis is the comprehension of negative sentences. In the literature there is a number of evidence suggesting that negation is not integrated immediately into the comprehension process, but only after dealing with the affirmative counterpart meaning of the sentence (e.g. Clark & Chase, 1972; Fischler, 1983; Hasson and Glucksberg, 2006; Kaup, Yaxley, Madden, Zwaan & Luedtke, 2007). Other evidence, however, suggests that if interpreted within pragmatic felicitous contexts, the actual meaning of the negation can be immediately accessed (Nieuwland and Kuperberg, 2008; Dale & Duran, 2011; Tian, Breheny and Ferguson, 2010, 2016; Arroyo, 1982). To date, it is still unclear which exactly are the pragmatic factors that allow to access immediately the actual meaning of the negation. The objective of this thesis is to try to identify some of these possible pragmatic factors. In six different experiments, using different experimental paradigms (sentence-picture verification task, probe-recognition task, self-paced reading task) we investigated four different pragmatic factors: 1) the use of the negation to describe a minority (Wason, 1965); 2) the use of the negation to describe something that non-exists (Nordmeyer and Frank, 2015); 3) the fact that a negative sentence answers to a negative Question Under Discussion (Tian, Breheny and Ferguson, 2010); 4) the use of the negation to describe something exceptional (Arroyo, 1982). For no one of these four factors we have found clear evidence that these are key pragmatic factors that allow to access immediately the actual meaning of the negation. At the opposite, our results seem to suggest that only in really specific situations the actual meaning of the negation can be immediately accessed, in particular when pragmatic and lexical predictability factors come into play together.