A07
Register effects in discourse expectations: Negation and modality in English

Link to: Projects / Area A "Register and grammar"

A07 investigates doubling constructions (e.g., negative concord, modal concord) in varieties of English in different situational-functional settings. It elevates the inquiry from the description and data validation of the phenomena in Phase I to the more specific hypothesis testing and modeling. Formal theoretical analyses, offline and online psycholinguistic methods and the state-of-art Bayesian statistical techniques will be used to tackle and model the variation in the use, comprehension, and perception of the related register variants in discourse.

Members

Project leader

Prof. Dr. Mingya Liu

Department of English and American Studies
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

mingya.liu@hu-berlin.de

Members

Stephanie Rotter

Department of English and American Studies
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

rotterst@hu-berlin.de

Student assistant

Elvido Maurer


Doctoral fellows

Souvik Sengupta


Former members

Dr. Juliane Schwab


Contact

Prof. Dr. Mingya Liu

 Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

(030) 2093-70908

mingya.liu@hu-berlin.de

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin

Project in Phase I

Project Title for Phase I

Pragmatic Functions and Effects of Register Variation and Switch: a Register approach to negation and polarity

Project Description for Phase I

Project A07 focuses on three sets of related phenomena in varieties of English: negative concord, pleonastic negation, and register-sensitive use of negative polarity items. All of these phenomena involve clear alternations with links to social meanings, which make them a promising empirical domain for the CRC. We investigate the grammatical and register-related factors in these alternations using a combination of theoretical, corpus, and experimental linguistic methods, aiming to make important contributions to the study of linguistic and register variants, and to an improved understanding of register and the relationship of register knowledge to grammatical knowledge.

Publications & Presentations

    Publications

    2025

  • Liu, Mingya; Rotter, Stephanie  (2025) Linguistic and Social Meaning Match: An experiment on modal concord in English In:  Experiments in Linguistic Meaning [DOI] [ViVo]
    Modal concord (MC) refers to the phenomenon where two modal elements of the same flavor and force in a sentence yield an interpretation of single modality (SM). In this paper, we report on an experimental study on MC in English, addressing their linguistic and social meaning. Our results show a strengthening effect by necessity MC and a weakening effect of possibility MC in that significantly higher speaker commitment ratings were received for necessity MC vs. SM constructions (i.e., must certainly vs. must) with the reverse pattern for possibility modal constructions (i.e., may possibly vs. may). Furthermore, MC and SM were shown to differ in social meanings, suggesting a correlation between the meaning strength of a linguistic expression and the social perception of the speaker.
  • Rotter, Stephanie; Liu, Mingya  (2025) Less formal and more rebellious — An experiment on the social meaning of negative concord in American English In:  Negative Concord: A Hundred Years On [DOI] [ViVo]
    Negative concord, which is present in some varieties of English, is considered ungrammatical in ‘standard’ contemporary English, where negative polarity items are used. While negative polarity item constructions have the semantics of single negation, negative concord constructions are considered ambiguous between a single vs. double negation reading. Recent research shows that the perception of negative concord varies depending on the situational context of its use, the properties of the comprehender as well as the methods of data elicitation (ratings vs. self-reports). We conducted a rating study in US English examining the interpretation and grammaticality of negative concord compared to negative polarity items, and the perception of negative concord speakers regarding their social background and persona. The results show that comprehenders – mostly self-re-ported non-dialect speakers of US English – interpreted negative concord similarly to negative polarity items, but judged negative concord as ungrammatical. Moreover, they associated negative concord use with lower levels in socioeconomic status and education than negative polarity items; in terms of persona, negative concord use was perceived as less formal and as more rebellious than negative polarity items. Additionally, our study shows experimental evidence for inter-individual (e.g., age- or gender-related) variation in the comprehension and perception of negative concord.

    • 2024

  • Lüdeling, Anke; Szucsich, Luka; Zeige, Lars Erik; Adli, Aria; Alexiadou, Artemis; Belz, Malte; Bouzouita, Miriam; Adli, Aria; Dreyer, Malte; Egg, Markus; Feulner, Anna Helene; Fleischer, Jürg; Gagarina, Natalia; Hirschmann , Hagen; Jannedy, Stefanie; Knoeferle, Pia; Krause, Thomas; Kutscher, Silvia; Liu, Mingya; Lütke, Beate; Machicao y Priemer, Antonio; Meyer, Roland; Mooshammer, Christine; Müller, Stefan; Sauerland, Uli; Sauermann, Antje; Schmitt, Viola; Schumacher, Nicole; Serova, Dina; Solt, Stephanie; Vander Klok, Jozina; Verhoeven, Elisabeth; Waltereit, Richard; Weirich, Melanie  (2024) Register: Language Users’ Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation. Frame text of the Second Phase Proposal for the CRC 1412[DOI] [ViVo]
  • Rotter, Stephanie; Liu, Mingya  (2024) A register approach to negative concord versus negative polarity items in English In:  Linguistics [DOI] [ViVo]
    Negative concord (NC) is used in many English varieties but usually considered ungrammatical in ‘standard’ contemporary English, where negative polarity items (NPIs) are used. In this paper, we take a novel experimental approach to the use of NC versus NPI constructions, in relation to register, sets of speech repertoires linked to specific situational and functional parameters. We report on two rating experiments with American and British English participants using interlocutor relations as a formality manipulation. Results show that (i) across both samples, NC constructions were rated as less appropriate than NPI associates, and (ii) there was a register effect in the American English data in that NC was rated less appropriate in formal than informal contexts. Our study is the first to provide experimental evidence for the register-sensitivity of NC constructions in American English.

    • 2023

  • Liu, Mingya; Schwab, Juliane; Hess, Ursula  (2023) Language and Face in Interactions: emotion perception, social meanings and communicative intentions In:  Frontiers in Psychology [DOI] [ViVo]
  • Pescuma, Valentina Nicole; Serova, Dina; Lukassek, Julia; Sauermann, Antje; Schäfer, Roland; Adli, Aria; Bildhauer, Felix; Egg, Markus; Hülk, Kristina; Ito, Aine; Jannedy, Stefanie; Kordoni, Valia; Kühnast, Milena; Kutscher, Silvia; Lange, Robert; Lehmann, Nico; Liu, Mingya; Lütke, Beate; Maquate, Katja; Mooshammer, Christine; Mortezapour, Vahid; Müller, Stefan; Norde, Muriel; Pankratz, Elizabeth; Patarroyo, Angela Giovanna; Plesca, Ana-Maria; Ronderos, Camilo R.; Rotter, Stephanie; Sauerland, Uli; Schulte, Britta; Schüppenhauer, Gediminas; Sell, Bianca Maria; Solt, Stephanie; Terada, Megumi; Tsiapou, Dimitra; Verhoeven, Elisabeth; Weirich, Melanie; Wiese, Heike; Zaruba, Kathy; Zeige, Lars Erik; Lüdeling, Anke; Knoeferle, Pia; Schnelle, Gohar  (2023) Situating language register across the ages, languages, modalities, and cultural aspects: Evidence from complementary methods In:  Frontiers in Psychology [DOI] [ViVo]
    In the present review paper by members of the collaborative research center ‘Register: Language Users’ Knowledge of SituationalFunctional Variation’ (CRC 1412), we assess the pervasiveness of register phenomena across different time periods, languages, modalities, and cultures. We define ‘register’ as recurring variation in language use depending on the function of language and on the social situation. Informed by rich data, we aim to better understand and model the knowledge involved in situation- and function-based use of language register. In order to achieve this goal, we are using complementary methods and measures. In the review, we start by clarifying the concept of ‘register’, by reviewing the state of the art, and by setting out our methods and modeling goals. Against this background, we discuss three key challenges, two at the methodological level and one at the theoretical level: 1. To better uncover registers in text and spoken corpora, we propose changes to established analytical approaches. 2. To tease apart between-subject variability from the linguistic variability at issue (intra-individual situation based register variability), we use within-subject designs and the modeling of individuals’ social, language, and educational background. 3. We highlight a gap in cognitive modeling, viz. modeling the mental representations of register (processing), and present our first attempts at filling this gap. We argue that the targeted use of multiple complementary methods and measures supports investigating the pervasiveness of register phenomena and yields comprehensive insights into the cross-methodological robustness of register-related language variability. These comprehensive insights in turn provide a solid foundation for associated cognitive modeling.
  • Rotter, Stephanie; Liu, Mingya  (2023) Interlocutor relation predicts the formality of the conversation: An experiment in American and British English In:  REALIS: Register Aspects of Language in Situation [DOI] [ViVo]
    Formality is an important notion in register research. However, it is hard to give it a precise definition. Furthermore, it is challenging to identify the situational parameters required for levels of formality. Potential parameters include the social relation between interlocutors. We conducted two rating studies with American and British English speakers and tested the connection between formality and social relations, while exploring the influence of certain demographic factors on the rating. We hypothesised that public social relations are associated with more formal contexts than private social relations. The results strongly confirmed the hypothesis. We expect that our findings shed further light on the connection between formality and social relations and consequently, inform experimental set-ups investigating variation in language use. 
  • Schwab, Juliane; Mueller, Jutta L.; Liu, Mingya  (2023) Dimensions of variation in sentence comprehension: A case study on understating negative polarity items in German In:  Linguistische Berichte [ViVo]
  • Liu, Mingya; Rotter, Stephanie  (2023) Modal concord in American and British English: A register-based experimental study In:  Proceedings of the 58th annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS58), University of Chicago [ViVo]

    • 2022

  • Schwab, Juliane; Liu, Mingya  (2022) Processing Attenuating NPIs in Indicative and Counterfactual Conditionals In:  Frontiers in Psychology [DOI] [ViVo]
    Both indicative and counterfactual conditionals are known to be licensing contexts for negative polarity items (NPIs). However, a recent theoretical account suggests that the licensing of attenuating NPIs like English all that in the conditional antecedent is sensitive to pragmatic differences between various types of conditionals. We conducted three behavioral experiments in order to test key predictions made by that proposal. In Experiment 1, we tested hypothetical indicative and counterfactual conditionals with the English NPI all that, finding that the NPI is degraded in the former compared to the latter. In Experiment 2, we compared hypothetical indicative conditionals and premise conditionals with the same NPI, again finding a degradation only for the former. Both results align with theoretically derived predictions purporting that hypothetical indicative conditionals are degraded due to their susceptibility to conditional perfection. Finally, Experiment 3 provides empirical evidence that comprehenders readily strengthen counterfactual conditionals to biconditionals, in line with theoretical analyses that assume that conditional perfection and counterfactual inferences are compatible. Their ability to still host attenuating NPIs in the conditional antecedent, by contrast, falls into place via the antiveridical inference to the falsity of the antecedent. Altogether, our study sheds light on the interplay between NPI licensing and the semantic and pragmatic properties of various types of conditionals. Moreover, it provides a novel perspective on the processing of different kinds of conditionals in context, in particular, with regard to their (non)veridicality properties.
  • Schwab, Juliane; Liu, Mingya  (2022) Attenuating NPIs in indicative vs. counterfactual conditionals In:  Gutzmann, Daniel & Sophie Repp, Eds.: Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 26 (SuB26), Universität zu Köln [ViVo]

    • 2021

  • Dudschig, Caroline; Kaup, Barbara; Liu, Mingya; Schwab, Juliane  (2021) The Processing of Negation and Polarity: An Overview In:  Journal of Psycholinguistic Research [DOI] [ViVo]
    Negation is a universal component of human language; polarity sensitivity (i.e., lexical distributional constraints in relation to negation) is arguably so while being pervasive across languages. Negation has long been a field of inquiry in psychological theories and experiments of reasoning, which inspired many follow-up studies of negation and negation-related phenomena in psycholinguistics. In generative theoretical linguistics, negation and polarity sensitivity have been extensively studied, as the related phenomena are situated at the interfaces of syntax, semantics and pragmatics, and are thus extremely revealing about the architecture of grammar. With the now long tradition of research on negation and polarity in psychology and psycholinguistics, and the emerging field of experimental semantics and pragmatics, a multitude of interests and experimental paradigms have emerged which call for re-evaluations and further development and integration. This special issue contains a collection of 16 research articles on the processing of negation and negation-related phenomena including polarity items, questions, conditionals, and irony, using a combination of behavioral (e.g., rating, reading, eye-tracking and sentence completion) and neuroimaging techniques (e.g., EEG). They showcase the processing of negation and polarity with or without context, in various languages and across different populations (adults, typically developing and ADHD children). The integration of multiple theoretical and empirical perspectives in this collection provides new insights, methodological advances and directions for future research.
  • Liu, Mingya; Rotter, Stephanie; Giannakidou , Anastasia  (2021) Bias and Modality in Conditionals: Experimental Evidence and Theoretical Implications In:  Journal of Psycholinguistic Research [DOI] [ViVo]
    The concept of bias is familiar to linguists primarily from the literature on questions. Following the work of Giannakidou and Mari (Truth and Veridicality in Grammar and Thought: Modality, Mood, and Propositional Attitudes, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2021), we assume “nonveridical equilibrium” (implying that p and ¬p as equal possibilities) to be the default for epistemic modals, questions and conditionals. The equilibrium of conditionals, as that of questions, can be manipulated to produce bias (i.e., reduced or higher speaker commitment). In this paper, we focus on three kinds of modal elements in German that create bias in conditionals and questions: the adverb wirklich ‘really’, the modal verb sollte ‘should’, and conditional connectives such as falls ‘if/in case’. We conducted two experiments collecting participants’ inference about speaker commitment in different manipulations, Experiment 1 on sollte/wirklich in ob-questions and wenn-conditionals, and Experiment 2 on sollte/wirklich in wenn/falls/V1-conditionals. Our findings are that both ob-questions and falls-conditionals express reduced speaker commitment about the modified (antecedent) proposition in comparison to wenn-conditionals, which did not differ from V1-conditionals. In addition, sollte/wirklich in the antecedent of conditionals both create negative bias about the antecedent proposition. Our studies are among the first that deal with bias in conditionals (in comparison to questions) and contribute to furthering our understanding of bias.
  • Schwab, Juliane; Liu, Mingya; Mueller, Jutta L.  (2021) On the Acquisition of Polarity Items: 11- to 12-Year-Olds' Comprehension of German NPIs and PPIs In:  Journal of Psycholinguistic Research [DOI] [ViVo]
    AbstractExisting work on the acquisition of polarity-sensitive expressions (PSIs) suggests that children show an early sensitivity to the restricted distribution of negative polarity items (NPIs), but may be delayed in the acquisition of positive polarity items (PPIs). However, past studies primarily targeted PSIs that are highly frequent in children’s language input. In this paper, we report an experimental investigation on children’s comprehension of two NPIs and two PPIs in German. Based on corpus data indicating that the four tested PSIs are present in child-directed speech but rare in young children’s utterances, we conducted an auditory rating task with adults and 11- to 12-year-old children. The results demonstrate that, even at 11–12 years of age, children do not yet show a completely target-like comprehension of the investigated PSIs. While they are adult-like in their responses to one of the tested NPIs, their responses did not demonstrate a categorical distinction between licensed and unlicensed PSI uses for the other tested expressions. The effect was led by a higher acceptance of sentences containing unlicensed PSIs, indicating a lack of awareness for their distributional restrictions. The results of our study pose new questions for the developmental time scale of the acquisition of polarity items.

    • Presentations

    2024

  • Rotter, Stephanie; Liu, Mingya  (2024) Semantic and Social Meaning Match: experiments on modal concord in US English In:  ELM - Experiments in Linugistic Meaning [ViVo]

    • 2023

  • Liu, Mingya  (2023) Sociolinguistics In:  Seminar HU Institut für deutsche Sprache und Lingusitik WiSe 2022/23 [ViVo]
  • Liu, Mingya  (2023) Research Methods In:  Seminar HU Institut für deutsche Sprache und Lingusitik WiSe 2022/23 [ViVo]
  • Rotter, Stephanie; Liu, Mingya  (2023) Social meaning of negative concord in American English In:  Workshop on “Language in Social Interaction” at the University of Wuppertal [ViVo]

    • 2022

  • Liu, Mingya; Rotter, Stephanie; Giannakidou , Anastasia  (2022) Bias and modality in conditionals In:  DGfS 2022, University of Tübingen [ViVo]
  • Liu, Mingya  (2022) HU-Workshop on "Multiple Modality" In:  Multiple Modality [ViVo]
  • Liu, Mingya  (2022) Sociolinguistics In:  Seminar HU Institut für deutsche Sprache und Lingusitik SoSe 2022  [ViVo]
  • Rotter, Stephanie; Liu, Mingya  (2022) Register sensitivity of negative concord in American and British English In:  SLE Workshop on "A hundred years of negative concord", University of Bucharest [ViVo]
  • Rotter, Stephanie; Liu, Mingya  (2022) Register sensitivity of negation, polarity and modality in American and British English In:  CRC Colloquium – HU Berlin [ViVo]
  • Schwab, Juliane; Liu, Mingya; Beese, Caroline; Gruber, Thomas; Mueller, Jutta L.  (2022) Testing predictive and integrative neural mechanisms in the processing of negative polarity items In:  HSP 2022, UC Santa Cruz [ViVo]
  • Liu, Mingya; Rotter, Stephanie  (2022) An experimental study of multiple modals and register effects in American and British English In:  CLS, University of Chicago [ViVo]
  • Liu, Mingya; Rotter, Stephanie  (2022) An experimental study of multiple modals and register effects in American and British English In:  Workshop on "Variation, contact, and modal constructions in English", University of Paris [ViVo]
  • Rotter, Stephanie; Antal, Caitlyn; Bechberger, Lucas; Haase, Viviana; Hinrichs, Nicolás Araneda; Schneider, Stefan; Strößner, Corina; Vernillo, Paola; Agha, Asif; Knoeferle, Pia; de Almeida, Roberto G.; Eckardt, Regine; Lewis, Martha; Liu, Mingya  (2022) Concepts in Action: Representation, Learning, and Application (CARLA 2022) In:  CARLA 2022 [ViVo]
    The first workshop “Concepts in Action: Representation, Learning, and Application” took place at the Institute of Cognitive Science at Osnabrück University in 2018, followed by two virtual events as part of the Bolzano Summer of Knowledge (BOSK) in 2020 and 2021. Currently, we are organizing a fourth (potentially hybrid) workshop “Concepts in Action: Representation, Learning, and Application” (CARLA) in 2022. In addition to a general main session, CARLA 2022 will feature a special session on concepts and register, in relation to the Collaborative Research Center CRC1412 “Register” at the Humboldt University of Berlin. We invite the submission of abstracts via EasyChair until May 15, 2022. Acceptance notifications will be sent out by June 15, 2022. Venue: Dorotheenstr. 24, 10117 Berlin, Room 1.101/1.102/1.103 Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany

    • 2021

  • Rotter, Stephanie; Wartenburger, Isabell; Liu, Mingya  (2021) A comparative experimental study on counterfactual conditionals: counterfactual thoughts, perspectives, and emotions In:  AMLaP 2021, Paris [ViVo]
  • Liu, Mingya; Rotter, Stephanie  (2021) Pragmatic Functions and Effects of Register Variation and Switch: a register approach to negation and polarity In:  CRC Retreat 2021 – HU Berlin [ViVo]

Featured Master's Theses

BA/English: David, Johanna. (2022). Mighty multiple modals: Jamaican Creole modality and language contact. First supervisor: Artemis Alexiadou; second supervisor: Mingya Liu.

BA/English: Sorg, Charlotte. (2022). Register sensitivity of expletive negation in English. First supervisor: Mingya Liu; second supervisor: Artemis Alexiadou.