The prosody of negation and its interpretation in sentence comprehension (C01)

• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics ; General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 509468465

The major question of the project is how intonation interacts with negation within the grammar and during on- and offline speech processing. Contributing to the Neg-Plus hypothesis, we will explore how negation is combined with prosodic categories in controlled speech-for-reading studies and in corpus data. The comprehension of negated sentences will be addressed both with online measures looking at the time-course of negation processing and offline measures assessing the cues used by hearers for arriving at the final interpretation. The question we pursue is whether prosodic cues create expectations concerning an upcoming negation, thereby facilitating the creation of a negated meaning representation.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• Subproject of: SFB 1629: Negation in language and beyond (NegLaB)
• Applicant Institution: Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
• Project Heads: Professor Dr. Markus Bader, since 1/2024; Professor Dr. Frank Kügler, since 1/2024