Using circles games to investigate the referential use of negation

ABSTRACT

Studies on the spontaneous production of negation suggest that it can be modulated by pragmatic principles of successful communication such as informativity and relevance. The present study investigates whether negation production is additionally modulated by a more general principle of effort minimisation. In a series of circles games, subjects were presented with pairs of circles and asked to complete a sentence that would allow a listener to identify one of the two circles. Negation was only produced when an affirmative description for the circle at issue was harder, i.e. there was no simple intuitive way to describe the circle's pattern. The length of the concurrent descriptions did not strictly influence the production of negation. The results suggest that the use of negation becomes more frequent as the effort to produce it decreases with respect to a concurrent affirmation, even at the cost of greater informativity of affirmation.

KEYWORDS:

• Negation
• pragmatics
• language production
• economy

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in OSF at https://osf.io/jzeb7/?view_only=95bdd02ff280430d8a61af990c2ce413.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflict of interest.

Notes

1 Following a reviewer's suggestion, we later calculated power based on Circles Game 1, which resulted in only 60 observations (≈4 subjects) necessary to reach 80% power with $\alpha =.05$, suggesting we clearly have sufficient power to detect the interaction effect of Polarity and Target Difficulty (w = .36).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Collaborative Research Centre 833 (SFB833) The Construction of Meaning/Z2 project appointed to Barbara Kaup by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) [– SFB 833 – Project ID 75650358].