Effects of Context and Individual Socio-Cognitive Variability on Negator Use

Abstract

Negative sentences are generally more cognitively demanding than affirmative ones. The contextual approach suggests that this additional cost can be modulated by pragmatic factors such as contextual informativity, specifically modeled via Question Under Discussion (QUD) accommodation in the Dynamic Pragmatic (DP) account. This study investigates how linguistic context and individual socio-cognitive ability (SCA) interact to shape the use of negation markers (i.e., negators). We examine the two most common negators in Mandarin Chinese, bu and mei, whose usage is associated with two linguistic features: (a) temporal Boundedness, indicating whether an event occurs in a specific time frame (e.g., yesterday vs. every day) and (b) the protagonist’s Volition, indicating whether the protagonist performs the denoted action intentionally or not (e.g., insist vs. have to). These features can co-occur in conflict, favoring different negators, and we exploit such cases to examine how contextual cues are weighed in negator use. We hypothesize that negator choice depends on which feature better addresses the negation-related QUD in a given context. Additionally, since evaluating Volition requires understanding others’ intentions, which is a core component of SCA, (c) individual differences in SCA may affect context-sensitivity to Volition. Results of our timed questionnaire show that temporal Boundedness was the primary factor in negator choice, while Volition exerted a stronger influence in unbounded contexts and among higher-SCA individuals. Response-time data further revealed greater processing effort when integrating volition prior to the ultimate decision. These findings highlight the dynamic interactions between linguistic context and individual cognitive variability in language use.