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
elena_albu84@yahoo.com
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]
3
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
5
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)
7
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
9
Results -
NOT
- concordance hits for
not
= 5068
→ exclusion of negative words, negative prefixes, negatives meanings or connotations
!!! *not* = 7227
- nothing, another, #we’rerenotgoingawayyouknow, JonNott
11
13
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
15
[not (X)]
= > [(N.R. says) not (Lab will give Referendum)]
!!! as they are expected to, as everyone expects them to
17
Conclusions
- not generates a variety of negative utterances:
● MetNeg [Not (X)]
● MetNeg [(X') not (X)]
Negative campaigning
● negative vs. positive binary
19
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.
