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How 'Not' Changes Everything: Brain Interprets Negated Adjectives - Neuroscience News
(neurosciencenews.com)
this post was submitted on 31 May 2024
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Not sure I understand this one. I'm finding it difficult to read this as anything other than "yes, most people understand negation as negation, and not as something entirely different". Are there any languages or cultures where negation is same as inversion?
How would you even invert an adjective that doesn't exist on a one-dimensional scale? For example, good<->bad makes sense, because they are clear opposites. But happy<->sad does not make sense, because emotions don't exist on a single axis and do not have clear opposites. "Not happy" encompasses all states besides happiness. Could be angry, could be sad, could just be neutral. Like the old saying goes, "the opposite of love is not hate; it's indifference".
Even for things within a single axis, like good vs. bad, it's more complicated than it looks like. For example I've noticed plenty Brits using "not bad" to convey "really good"; while typically Americans would use it for "passable". So you're being spot on when you say that it is not the same as an inversion.
On logical grounds what happens there is instead exclusion - and then, which value you'll take from the leftover will be heavily culture-dependent.
I believe that this should explain even the negation in non-IE languages like Japanese "nai", Guaraní (n[d]- -[r]i circumfix).
At least in theory you'd invert all meaningful attributes. In some cases it doesn't really make sense; just like you can't invert a natural number. The negation = exclusion still does make sense in all of them.