Linguistics Seminar: The pervasive problems of processing negation

Speaker: Dr Nina Kazanina

In this talk I will discuss issues arising during real time processing of sentences that contain a negative marker. First, I will examine negative sentences in Russian in which the negation changes

The grammatical case of the direct object from Accusative to Genitive (the so-called ‘Genitive of Negation’), leading to a situation where the object cannot be incorporated into the parsing tree using a default

parsing procedure. On the basis of reading times data I will argue that the parser uses grammatical information in order to predict multiple syntactic heads which in turn enables strictly incremental processing. Second, I will discuss whether constructing the meaning of a negative sentence is inherently more difficult than constructing the meaning of an affirmative sentence, in particular, whether interpreting a negative sentence (e.g. ‘The top shelf does not contain a lamp.’) involves a two-step process that first invokes the corresponding affirmative (The top shelf contains a lamp.) and then negates it (NOT (The top shelf contains the lamp)). I consider both cases in a more global context of prediction in language processing