Inbar & Shor (2019) Covert negation in Israeli Hebrew

Covert negation in Israeli Hebrew: Evidence from co-speech gestures §

📇 Index §

• 85
  • gestural patterns usually linked to explicit grammatical markers of negation are also used with lexemes that only imply a negative meaning (covert negation) → abstract negation class for gestures?
• 86
  • some gestural patterns associated with negation are shared across languages, e.g. the headshake, suggesting a “cultually shared class of gestures” → negation as a cognitive domain
  • thematic (derived from lexical meaning) vs pragmatic (contextually linked to specific situations) covert negation (Grishina 2015)
  • overview of how Israeli Hebrew marks overt negation
• 87
  • methodology: corpus of TV interviews
  • gestural patterns may co-occur; multi-hand vs single-hand gestures taken as variations in intensity; “temporal synchrony” of gestural and verbal negation also varied
• 88ff.
  • negative gestures were used in conjunction with
    • lexemes which meaning has a negative component
      • emphasising the neg-element
    • amplifiers (denial of alternatives), quantifiers (rejection of exceptions) and intensifiers
      • intensification = exclusion of anything else = semantically negated
      • rejection of objection
    • indefinite modifiers (think hedging)
    • restrictive discourse particles, e.g. only (rak in Israeli Hebrew) or just (paʃut)
    • “conversational implicatures” → asking rhetorical questions?
• 93
  • discussion: why do they co-occur?
    • they share a "higher abstract notion, namely negativity rather than negation" Ty

Metadaten – PDF

Inbar, Anna, und Leon Shor. „Covert Negation in Israeli Hebrew: Evidence from Co-Speech Gestures“. Journal of Pragmatics, Bd. 143, April 2019, S. 85–95. DOI.org (Crossref), j.pragma.2019.02.011.

• Keywords:: negation, gesture-types
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Imported: 2023-06-15 16:12

⭐ Main §

Highlight ( p. 85)

the gestural patterns that are usually coordinated with grammatical markers of negation may co-occur with various lexemes that have a negative component as part of their meaning

Highlight ( p. 86)

Inbar and Shor (2017) identified recurrent gestural patterns that co-occur with grammatical negation in spoken Israeli Hebrew, and accounted for their forms and functions in terms of their conceptual foundations in primary metaphoric, spacemotion schematic, and force dynamic reasoning. It was shown that each of the three types of grammatical negation (morphosyntactical, derivational, and lexical) may be accompanied by any gesture from the following set of patterns: headshakes, ‘sweeping away’ gestures, ‘holding away’ gestures, ‘hands up’ gestures, ‘finger-wagging’ gestures, shoulder shrugs.

✅ Definition §

Highlight ( p. 85)

Negation: Negation is commonly defined as a process or construction in grammatical and semantic analysis that typically expresses the contradiction of some or all of a sentence’s meaning (Crystal, 2008: 323). Every human language seems to have some morphosyntactic means at its disposal to express negation, suggesting that negation is possibly one of the universal features of human language (Miestamo, 2007: 553; Horn, 2010a,b: 1).

Highlight ( p. 86)

underlying cognitive domain → wider scope of negation

Imported: 2023-06-16 18:39

⭐ Main §

Highlight ( p. 88)

gestural patterns were found to be coordinated with words such as kaʃe ‘difficult’, mesubac ‘complicated’, neelam ‘disappeared’, lehafsik ‘to stop’, met ‘die’, ibdu ‘lost’, lefarek ‘to take apart’, fisfast ‘missed’

Highlight ( p. 88)

‘Negative gestures’ were found to appear in contexts of intensification, typically co-occurring with amplifiers, universal quantifiers, and intensifying adjectives. → Why? Why would they co-occur? These aren’t even negative intensifiers like “never”. This almost seems paradoxical.

Highlight ( p. 88)

meod ‘very’, haci ‘the most’, harbe ‘a lot’, hamon ‘plenty’, bejoter ‘highly’, cadmaʃmait ‘unequivocally’, legamrej ‘totally’, lacalutin ‘completely’, bevadaj ‘definitely’, and beheclet ‘certainly’

Highlight ( p. 88)

hakol ‘everything’, kol ‘every, all’,orkulam ‘everyone’

Highlight ( p. 88)

Intensifying adjectives such as madhima ‘astonishing’, nifla ‘wonderful’,ornehederet ‘amazing’

Highlight ( p. 89)

He provides a positive response which is verbally intensified by means of the amplifier haci ‘the most’, and gesturally by moving the right hand from the center of his body to the periphery (Pattern 2), along with multiple lateral headshakes (Pattern 1).

Highlight ( p. 90)

Negative gestures’ occasionally co-occur with indefinite modifiers and hedging expressions, such as ejze ‘some’, ejzeʃehu ‘some.SGM’,orejzeʃehi ‘some.SGF’.

Highlight ( p. 90)

accompany discourse particles that imply negation

Highlight ( p. 92)

n some instances, the discussed gestural patterns seem to be related to the conversational implicature arising from the verbal utterance. In these cases, the gesture conveys a separate message from that of the propositional content of the utterance.

Highlight ( p. 93)

we argue that the occurrence of the gestures in the contexts described above suggests that these gestures indicate a higher abstract notion, namely ‘negativity’ rather than negation

Highlight ( p. 93)

‘negativity’ relies on the cognitive approach to negation, initiated by Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (1996), which explores deeper levels than syntax and morphology to ‘cover the negation incorporated in words, discourse or knowledge frames.’

✅ Definition §

Highlight ( p. 88)

Giv on (2001: 395) refers to the phenomenon in terms of ‘inherent/lexical negation,’ and suggests that particular words, such as inherently negative modality verbs (‘lack’, ‘refuse’, ‘avoid’, and the like) have negative inference.

Highlight ( p. 88)

Sovran (2014: Ch. 5) postulates that such lexemes share a Neg-element as a component of their lexical meaning, and that this element has a special status in the actual and mental lexicon.

Highlight ( p. 88)

Open-Questions: subdomains of Neg-element in the lexicon: the somatic-experiential (such as pain, fear, sorrow), interactional-social (such as rape, crime, violence), culture-dependent (such as hell, devil, doomsday), and prelogical (such as absence, missing, deviation) → Into which category does something like lefarek (to take apart) fit?

Highlight ( p. 89)

From a semantic perspective, intensification can be taken as conveying a very high degree (if not the highest) of some relevant scale. At the same time, this degree can be construed as the denial of the rest of the scale, or of other relevant alternatives (cf. Kendon, 2004: 255e258).

🧩 Methodology §

Highlight ( p. 87)

20-h corpus of TV interviews in Hebrew recorded between 2009 and 2017 with over 50 speakers

⭕ Questions §

Highlight ( p. 87)

Third, different performances of the revealed patterns d one-handed or two-handed, as well as single gesture or several repetitions of the chosen pattern d were considered as variations within the pattern that may reflect various degrees of intensity (Inbar and Shor, 2017).

Note ( p. 93)

→ Reading this, shouldn’t the title of the paper be “covert negativity”?

ℹ Info §

Highlight ( p. 89)

utterances that contain a so-called ‘redundant’ or ‘superfluous’ negation that occurs in ‘WHword þ that þ not’ constructions in Israeli Hebrew. Such constructions convey a meaning of positive intensification, despite the presence of a negative marker…‘Wherever they came from.’ (lit. ‘From where they did not come from’)

Highlight ( p. 93)

particular expressions that do not include any markers of negation may express negation or negativity on different stages of grammaticalization processes in which they are involved. For example, it has been shown that diachronically, inherently negative verbs, such as ‘fail’, ‘lack’, ‘refuse’, ‘decline’,or‘avoid’, may give rise to negation-marking morphemes. In the process of grammaticalization, the verbs’ specific semantic features are bleached out, leaving only their negative inference (Heine and Kuteva, 2002: 188; Giv on, 2001: 382e383).

Highlight ( p. 93)

This pattern of semantic change is not limited to the phrase level but can also be observed in the constructional level. For instance, a common way to express intensification in the domain of love/desire/adoration in Israeli Hebrew is by using the idiomatic construction [X PRD al Y] [‘X PRD on Y’], which employs negatively connotated predicates that are not obviously related to LOVE/DESIRE/ADORATION, but rather originate from the conceptual domains of DEATH (e.g., met ‘die’), ILLNESS (e.g., cole ‘sick/ ill’), INSANITY (e.g., meʃuga ‘crazy’), and ANNIHILATION (harus ‘devastated’)(Vardi, 2015).