Pragmatic reasoning in context: Anticipating negation for adjectives

Abstract

Negation processing seems to be facilitated in pragmatically felicitous contexts compared to infelicitous ones. Using a novel methodological approach, we investigated whether adults can identify felicitous contexts for negative statements by anticipating affirmative or negative sentence continuations (e.g., The socks were not dry. / The socks were wet.) for naturalistic contexts. Results from our forced choice study indicate that participants selected negative statements more frequently after contexts intended to elicit a negative statement than after contexts intended to elicit an affirmative statement. This effect was observed for absolute gradable adjectives but not reliably for relative gradable adjectives. Our study shows that naturalistic contexts contain cues for the polarity of subsequent sentences and that these cues are used by speakers to anticipate affirmative vs. negative sentences.