TY - GEN A1 - Gotzner, Nicole A1 - Mazzarella, Diana T1 - Face Management and Negative Strengthening: The Role of Power Relations, Social Distance, and Gender T2 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe 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. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 750 KW - conversational implicature KW - negation KW - politeness KW - social meaning KW - antonymy KW - adjectives Y1 - 2022 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-543907 SN - 1866-8364 SP - 1 EP - 13 PB - Universitätsverlag Potsdam CY - Potsdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Gotzner, Nicole A1 - Mazzarella, Diana T1 - Face Management and Negative Strengthening BT - The Role of Power Relations, Social Distance, and Gender JF - 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 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.602977 SN - 1664-042X VL - 12 SP - 1 EP - 13 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne, Schweiz ER - TY - GEN A1 - Clahsen, Harald A1 - Paulmann, Silke A1 - Budd, Mary-Jane A1 - Barry, Christopher T1 - Morphological encoding beyond slots and fillers BT - an ERP study of comparative formation in English T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - One important organizational property of morphology is competition. Different means of expression are in conflict with each other for encoding the same grammatical function. In the current study, we examined the nature of this control mechanism by testing the formation of comparative adjectives in English during language production. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded during cued silent production, the first study of this kind for comparative adjective formation. We specifically examined the ERP correlates of producing synthetic relative to analytic comparatives, e.g. angriervs. more angry. A frontal, bilaterally distributed, enhanced negative-going waveform for analytic comparatives (vis-a-vis synthetic ones) emerged approximately 300ms after the (silent) production cue. We argue that this ERP effect reflects a control mechanism that constrains grammatically-based computational processes (viz. more comparative formation). We also address the possibility that this particular ERP effect may belong to a family of previously observed negativities reflecting cognitive control monitoring, rather than morphological encoding processes per se. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 550 KW - event-related potentials KW - brain potentials KW - language production KW - word production KW - past-tense KW - electrophysiological evidence KW - cognitive control KW - single word KW - time-course KW - adjectives Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-426481 SN - 1866-8364 IS - 550 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Bosch, Sina A1 - Veríssimo, Joao Marques A1 - Clahsen, Harald T1 - Inflectional morphology in bilingual language processing BT - an age-of-acquisition study T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - This study addresses the question of how age of acquisition (AoA) affects grammatical processing, specifically with respect to inflectional morphology, in bilinguals. We examined experimental data of more than 100 participants from the Russian/German community in Berlin, all of whom acquired Russian from birth and German at different ages. Using the cross-modal lexical priming technique, we investigated stem allomorphs of German verbs that encode multiple morphosyntactic features. The results revealed a striking AoA modulation of observed priming patterns, indicating efficient access to morphosyntactic features for early AoAs and a gradual decline with increasing AoAs. In addition, we found a discontinuity in the function relating AoA to morphosyntactic feature access, suggesting a sensitive period for the development of morphosyntax. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 569 KW - critical-period KW - 2nd-language grammar KW - adjectives KW - lexicon KW - L1 KW - L2 Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-433371 SN - 1866-8364 IS - 569 SP - 339 EP - 360 ER -