Negation and approximation as configurational construals in SPACE
Författare
Redaktör
- Carita Paradis
- Jean Hudson
- Ulf Magnusson
Summary, in English
This article is a window into conceptual space through antonyms, negated antonyms and antonyms modified by degree modifiers. It investigates native speakers’ understanding of negation in combination with BOUNDED antonymic adjectival meanings and also in relation to their interpretations of the approximating degree modifier, ‘almost’ in Swedish. The results of the investigation are compared with a similar study by Paradis and Willners (2006), which includes ‘not’ with UNBOUNDED SCALE meanings and in relation to ‘fairly’.
We propose that ‘not’ is a degree modifier and like all other degree modifiers it operates on the configurational construals in SPACE. In combination with BOUNDED antonyms ‘not’ operates on the boundary and bisects a spatial structure. The combinations of ‘not’ and BOUNDED meanings are interpreted as synonyms of their antonyms. ‘Almost closed’ differs significantly from ‘closed’ but is not significantly different from ‘not open’. In contrast, in combination with UNBOUNDED antonyms, ‘not’ modifies the UNBOUNDED SCALE structure and evokes a range on the scale in SPACE in the same way as ‘fairly’ does. While the results for the UNBOUNDED meanings are very robust across all test items, the BOUNDED meanings are much more volatile and adaptive to alternative scalar interpretations.
We propose that ‘not’ is a degree modifier and like all other degree modifiers it operates on the configurational construals in SPACE. In combination with BOUNDED antonyms ‘not’ operates on the boundary and bisects a spatial structure. The combinations of ‘not’ and BOUNDED meanings are interpreted as synonyms of their antonyms. ‘Almost closed’ differs significantly from ‘closed’ but is not significantly different from ‘not open’. In contrast, in combination with UNBOUNDED antonyms, ‘not’ modifies the UNBOUNDED SCALE structure and evokes a range on the scale in SPACE in the same way as ‘fairly’ does. While the results for the UNBOUNDED meanings are very robust across all test items, the BOUNDED meanings are much more volatile and adaptive to alternative scalar interpretations.
Avdelning/ar
Publiceringsår
2013
Språk
Engelska
Publikation/Tidskrift/Serie
The Construal of Spatial Meaning Windows into Conceptual Space
Fulltext
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Dokumenttyp
Del av eller Kapitel i bok
Förlag
Oxford University Press
Ämne
- Languages and Literature
Status
Published
ISBN/ISSN/Övrigt
- ISBN: 978-0-19-964163-5