Beware of negative utterance; they can be most devastating.
The Use of Negation on Twitter during the 2014 European Elections
Elena ALBU
LiLPa, University of Strasbourg
9e Journées Internationales de la Linguistique de Corpus
Twitter at the European Elections: A Comparative International Study of the Use of Twitter by Candidates at the European
Parliamentary Elections in May 2014 [TEE2014]
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Main Aim
● the use of negation on Twitter during the EE 2014:
- What types of negatives utterances are used in the electoral tweets? - To what extent does negation shape the candidates' political
Overview
●
The linguistics of Twitter
●
Negation – prefatory remarks
●
Types of negative utterances used on Twitter during EE 2014
●
The argumentative force of negation
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Negation
● a complex cognitive and linguistic phenomenon:
- forms of expression vs. meanings
● various interpretations:
- as a logical connective: it has a wide scope, reversing the truth value of a proposition p in ¬ p (Horn and Wansing 2015)
- at the linguistic level: a narrow scope constituent negation (Moeschler 2013)
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The Use of Negation during EE 2014
●
Corpus of data:
- 72860 tweets were collected overall
- 309 Twitter accounts of the UK candidates for the EE 2014
- time span of 4 weeks
The Use of Negation during EE 2014
●
negative utterances containing
not, n't
●
form vs. meaning
:
→ apparent sentential negation, functioning as a constituent negation and having different meanings assigned
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Results -
NOT
- concordance hits for
not
= 5068
→ exclusion of negative words, negative prefixes, negatives meanings or connotations
!!! *not* = 7227
- nothing, another, #we’rerenotgoingawayyouknow, JonNott
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Types of negative utterances
- different mental structures:
● [not (X)]
+ rejection NOT
● [(X') not (X)] vs. [not (X) but (X')]
=> metarepresentational negation (MetNeg) (Albu 2017) - an action of rejection
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[not (X)]
= > [(N.R. says) not (Lab will give Referendum)]
!!! as they are expected to, as everyone expects them to
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Conclusions
- not generates a variety of negative utterances:
● MetNeg [Not (X)]
● MetNeg [(X') not (X)]
Negative campaigning
● negative vs. positive binary
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References
Albu, E. (2017): Description vs. rejection in the Analysis of Negation: Evidence from Romanian and English, Lingua, 191-192, 22-41.
Albu, E. (2016): Love Britain? Vote UKIP! The Pragmatics of Electoral Tweets during the EE2014, in Frame, A., Mercier, A., Brachotte, G., Thimm, C. (eds) Tweets from the Campaign Trail: Researching the Use of Twitter during the European Parliamentary Elections, Peter Lang, 145-169.
Horn, L. and Wansing, H. (2015): "Negation", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL: <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/entries/negation/>.
Kaup et al. (2007): Experiential simulation of negated text information. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 60, 976-990.
