Pragmatic Felicity of Negation in Japanese

• In Event: Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: PS 13 Topic - Language, Communication

Abstract

Children have difficulty in comprehending negation (Kim, 1985), although their challenges stem from pragmatic licensing of negation, rather than processing the syntax/semantics of negation (Reuter et al., 2017). Nordmeyer & Frank (2018) examined children and adults’ ratings of the pragmatic informativeness of negation, modifying visual contexts (characters holding objects; see Table 1) in which a true negative sentence, e.g., ‘Abby doesn’t have an apple’, was presented. Children and adults rated the sentence higher, finding it more informative, when everybody but Abby has an apple than when nobody, including Abby, has an apple. Raters’ preference for Abby’s uniquely not having an apple was predicted by Neo-Gricean pragmatic principles requiring that negation informatively point to the uniqueness of the negated referent. Adults also rated the sentence higher when Abby has nothing than when she has an alternate object, finding the sentence more informative with the referent’s (apple’s) nonexistence than its alternation; Abby’s having an alternate object, e.g., a cat, makes an alternate utterance, e.g., ‘Abby has a cat’, more informative, lowering ratings for negation. However, children were not tested in these conditions, leaving it open how they rate nonexistence vs. alternation.

The current proposal investigates the felicity of negation in Japanese, building upon Nordmeyer & Frank (2018). Using their visual context modification, we examine a Japanese-specific phenomenon involving negation, which uniquely generates an alternate prediction about speakers’ preference for nonexistence vs. alternation, but has not yet been investigated empirically. In Japanese, the topic-marking particle '–wa' marks contrast depending on context. In negative sentences, the element to which the contrastive '–wa' (capitalized in (1)) is attached is the direct target of negation (Hanaoka McGloin, 1987).

(1) Abby-wa ringo-WA mottei-nai.
Abby-Topic apple-Contrastive have-negation
“Abby doesn’t have an apple (but has something else).”

(2) Abby-wa ringo-o mottei-nai.
Abby-Topic apple-Accusative have-negation
“Abby doesn’t have an apple.”

When the object ‘apple’ carries the contrastive '–wa' as in (1), it implies that ‘it is not an apple that Abby has, but she has something else’, wherein the scope of negation is designated to ‘apple’ to which '–wa' is attached. When ‘apple’ carries the Accusative marker –o as in (2), this implicature does not arise. We will investigate how Japanese speakers rate negative sentences like (1-2). We test the following predictions: (i) speakers will derive the implicature and rate (1) higher when Abby has an alternate object than when she has nothing, contrary to the English findings in Nordmeyer & Frank (2018); (ii) speakers will rate (2) higher when everybody but Abby has an apple than when they have nothing, as predicted by Neo-Gricean pragmatic principles.

Amid the pandemic, we will implement testing remotely, recruiting adult Japanese speakers. The findings will reveal how felicity of negation, which is modulated variably across languages, is rated by Japanese speakers, constituting the first study to examine the impact of the contrastive marker '–wa' on the processing of negation. Findings, crucially, will provide baseline data for a future developmental study in which Japanese children’s rating will be investigated adopting the same paradigm.

Authors

• Ayumi Nobuki, University of Kansas
  Presenting Author

• Utako Minai, University of Kansas
  Non-Presenting Author