Can negative sentences express events? Evidence from a rating study

Abstract

While affirmative sentences express events, it remains unclear whether negative sentences denote the absence of events, intrinsically negative events, or positive events under a negative description. To investigate the ontological status of negative sentences, we used event anaphora as a diagnostic to determine whether they can be perceived as event-like antecedents. Participants read affirmative (e.g., Mary slept the whole night) and negative sentences (e.g., Mary didn’t sleep the whole night) and rated the suitability of the continuation This has happened before as a natural follow-up. The sentences were either embedded in a broader context (i.e., Mary and her friends went out to a party last Friday) or presented without additional contextual information. If negative sentences license event anaphora in the same way as affirmative sentences, this would suggest that they denote event-type objects rather than mere absences of events. The results showed that both affirmative and negative sentences were perceived as suitable event antecedents. The possibility to assign anaphoric reference to negative sentences together with their compatibility with the verb happen speaks in favor of the existence of negative events as linguistic entities. Overall, these findings suggest that negative events share core linguistic properties with positive events and can be included in the broader class of event-like objects.