PRAGMATIC ASPECTS OF NEGATION IN SENTENCE EVALUATION AND COMPLETION TASKS
Elizabeth R. Cornish · British Journal of Psychology · 1971
The appropriateness of a sentence such as ‘The circle is not all red’ was examined in relation to circles in which the proportion of red was varied. Expt. I showed that subjects took longest to evaluate this sentence when the circle contained only a small proportion of red. Expt. II showed that the tendency to complete an incomplete sentence with ‘red’, and to consider such a completion as appropriate, increased with the proportion of red in the circle. These results suggest that the appropriateness of a negative copulative sentence is frequently a function of a correlated affirmative presupposition.