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Face Management and Negative Strengthening: The Role of Power Relations, Social Distance, and Gender

Year: 2021

Type: article

Abstract: Negated gradable adjectives often convey an interpretation that is stronger than their literal meaning, which is referred to as ‘negative strengthening.’ For example, a sentence like ‘John is not kind’ may give rise to the inference that John is rather mean . Crucially, negation is more likely to be pragmatically strengthened in the case of positive adjectives (‘not kind’ to mean rather mean ) than negative adjectives (‘not mean’ to mean rather kind ). A classical explanation of this polarity asymmetry is based on politeness, specifically on the potential face threat of bare negative adjectives ( Horn, 1989 ; Brown and Levinson, 1987 ). This paper presents the results of two experiments investigating the role of face management in negative strengthening. We show that negative strengthening of positive and negative adjectives interacts differently with the social variables of power, social distance, and gender.

Source: Frontiers in Psychology

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.602977

Authors: Nicole Gotzner, Diana Mazzarella

Institutions: University of Potsdam, University of Neuchâtel

Language: English

Topic: Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies

Subfield: Language and Linguistics

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $2,241

Funders: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Universität Potsdam