ABSTRACT
Sentential negation is a universal syntactic feature of human languages that mediates the expression of the reverse truth value of any given sentence. Across languages it is invariably grammaticalized by using lexical morphemes, such as “not” in “John has not left” vs. “John has left” (Horn, 1989; Zanuttini, 1997). In other words, in no language can a negative sentence be realized by simply rearranging the word order of the corresponding affirmative declarative sentence. This sharply contrasts with cases like interrogative sentences, such as “Has John left?” derived from its affirmative counterpart “John has left.” Abundant psycholinguistic research has been devoted in the past to investigate how sentential negation affects language processing. Two main classes of results have emerged from these studies. On the one hand, sentence comprehension—as tested, for example, in sentence-picture matching tasks (Carpenter and Just, 1975; Clark and Chase, 1972; Trabasso et al., 1971)—was shown to be more difficult for negative than for affirmative sentences. Negative sentences required longer processing times and were associated with higher error rates. On the other hand, studies testing for the impact of negation on the accessibility of information mentioned within its scope—using, for instance, word recognition or priming tasks (Kaup, 2001; Kaup and Zwaan, 2003; MacDonald and Just, 1989)—showed that response times were significantly longer for negated than for non-negated items. These two classes of evidence have led to divergent views on the mental representation of negation. The first type of evidence has been taken to suggest that negative sentences are syntactically more demanding than affirmative sentences, and according to this view stronger activations of perisylvian brain regions are to be expected. In turn, the second type of evidence speaks for a reduced access to conceptual representations of the negated items; accordingly, reduced activations of the brain circuits involved in conceptual representations are to be expected.
