TY  - JOUR
A1  - Gotzner, Nicole
A1  - Mazzarella, Diana
T1  - Face Management and Negative Strengthening
T2  - Frontiers in psychology / Frontiers Research Foundation
N2  - 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 John is rather mean. Crucially, negation is more likely to be pragmatically strengthened in the case of positive adjectives (‘not kind’ to mean rather mean) than negative adjectives (‘not mean’ to mean rather kind). 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.
KW  - conversational implicature
KW  - negation
KW  - politeness
KW  - social meaning
KW  - antonymy
KW  - adjectives
Y1  - 2021
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/54391
SN  - 1664-042X
VL  - 12
SP  - 1
EP  - 13
PB  - Frontiers Research Foundation
CY  - Lausanne, Schweiz
ER  -