ABSTRACT
The topic of ‘negation’ has been studied from many angles over the last few decades. Its syntactic, morphological, and, recently, its pragmatic structures have been researched extensively in linguistics, as well as in logic, psychology, and psycholinguistics. Less attention has been paid to the semantic variants of the general notion of ‘negativity’ or to the meaning relations between words such as ‘broken’, ‘absent’, ‘disappear’, ‘no’, ‘lack, ‘hell’, ‘poison’, ‘scapegoat’, and others. This chapter examines the hypothesis that there is a Neg-element common to these and other lexemes, and that this element has a special status in the actual and mental lexicon. Various methods are suggested for grouping and sorting the lexemes that include this element. The result of the analysis of meaning relations among Neg-words is the discovery of four sources of ‘negativity’; that is, four layers in the conceptual system: the somatic-experiential level comprising psychological signals and thresholds, the interactional social level, and the culture-dependent level of Neg-element. The most interesting and least transparent is the fourth layer: a prelogical conception of ‘identity’, ‘existence’, ‘functioning’, and ‘stability’ and its counter Neg-elements. The analysis provides an explanation for the human bias toward the positive. It helps explain the logical and mathematical everyday algebra of pluses and minuses as reflected in the saying ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’.
