“Not good” implies “bad” but “not bad” doesn’t imply “good”: new insights into the asymmetry of negation
If one is told that something is “not good”, one will likely pragmatically infer that it is pretty bad, whereas if one is told, conversely, that something is “not bad”, one is less likely to infer that it is pretty good. This “negation asymmetry” (Colston 1999), aka “negative strengthening” (Horn 1989, Mazzarella & Gotzner 2024, i.a.) has been confirmed experimentally for a variety of antonyms and is typically explained in terms of politeness. My talk has three aims. First, I will outline a novel explanation inspired by Sassoon’s (2013) semantics of antonyms. Second, I will point out and address an analogous valence asymmetry as it arises with scalar implicatures. Third, I will discuss the interplay between semantic cues, morphosyntactic structure and cultural norms in such pragmatic inferences.
References
Colston, H. L. (1999). “Not good” is “bad,” but “not bad” is not “good”: An analysis of three accounts of negation asymmetry. Discourse Processes, 28(3), 237-256.
Gotzner, N., & Mazzarella, D. (2024). Negative strengthening: The interplay of evaluative polarity and scale structure. Journal of Semantics, ffae004.
Horn, Laurence R. (1989). A Natural History of Negation. University of Chicago Press.
Sassoon, G. W. (2013). A typology of multidimensional adjectives. Journal of semantics, 30(3), 335-380.