Face Management and Negative Strengthening
- 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.
Author details: | Nicole GotznerORCiDGND, Diana MazzarellaORCiD |
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DOI: | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.602977 |
ISSN: | 1664-042X |
Pubmed ID: | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34646182 |
Title of parent work (English): | Frontiers in psychology / Frontiers Research Foundation |
Subtitle (English): | The Role of Power Relations, Social Distance, and Gender |
Publisher: | Frontiers Research Foundation |
Place of publishing: | Lausanne, Schweiz |
Further contributing person(s): | Valentina Cuccio, Paolo Canal, Bob van Tiel |
Publication type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Date of first publication: | 2021/09/27 |
Publication year: | 2020 |
Release date: | 2022/03/18 |
Tag: | adjectives antonymy; conversational implicature; negation; politeness; social meaning |
Volume: | 12 |
Article number: | 602977 |
Number of pages: | 13 |
First page: | 1 |
Last Page: | 13 |
Funding institution: | German Research Foundation (DFG) as part of the Xprag.de |
Funding institution: | InitiativeGerman Research Foundation (DFG) |
Funding number: | BE 4348/4-1 |
Funding number: | GO 3378/1-1 |
Organizational units: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften / Department Linguistik |
DDC classification: | 1 Philosophie und Psychologie / 15 Psychologie / 150 Psychologie |
Peer review: | Referiert |
Grantor: | Publikationsfonds der Universität Potsdam |
Publishing method: | Open Access / Gold Open-Access |
License (German): | CC-BY - Namensnennung 4.0 International |
External remark: | Zweitveröffentlichung in der Schriftenreihe Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe ; 750 |