Gotzner Nicole, Mazzarella Diana
Cognitive Sciences, Department of Linguistics, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany.
Cognitive Science Centre, University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland.
Front Psychol. 2021 Sep 27;12:602977. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.602977. eCollection 2021.
Negated gradable adjectives often convey an interpretation that is stronger than their literal meaning, which is referred to as 'negative strengthening.' For example, a sentence like 'John is not kind' may give rise to the inference that . Crucially, negation is more likely to be pragmatically strengthened in the case of positive adjectives ('not kind' to mean ) than negative adjectives ('not mean' to mean ). A classical explanation of this polarity asymmetry is based on politeness, specifically on the potential face threat of bare negative adjectives (Horn, 1989; Brown and Levinson, 1987). This paper presents the results of two experiments investigating the role of face management in negative strengthening. We show that negative strengthening of positive and negative adjectives interacts differently with the social variables of power, social distance, and gender.
被否定的可分级形容词通常传达一种比其字面意思更强的解释，这被称为“否定强化”。例如，像“约翰不善良”这样的句子可能会引发这样的推断……关键的是，与消极形容词（“不刻薄”表示……）相比，否定在积极形容词的情况下（“不善良”表示……）更有可能在语用上得到强化。对这种极性不对称的经典解释基于礼貌原则，具体而言基于光秃秃的消极形容词对潜在面子的威胁（霍恩，1989；布朗和列文森，1987）。本文呈现了两项实验的结果，这些实验探究了面子管理在否定强化中的作用。我们表明，积极和消极形容词的否定强化与权力、社会距离和性别等社会变量的相互作用方式不同。
