How can you compare! On negated comparisons as comparisons
Rachel Giora, Dana Zimmerman, Ofer Fein · Intercultural Pragmatics · 2008
Results from 3 experiments argue in favor of the view that, when relevant to contextual information, negated concepts are retained rather than suppressed (Giora 2006, 2007; Giora et al. 2007). It is this retainability of negated information that allows for negated comparisons to come across as similarly appropriate as their affirmative counterparts (Experiment 1), and be as similarly sensitive to degree of prototypicality, as found earlier for affirmative statements (Experiments 2–3); it is also this retainability of negated information that accounts for the readings times of targets involving a prototypical property of the negated source, which were speedier than those involving a less prototypical one (Experiment 3).