Dynamic pragmatic view of negation processing Ye Tian, Université Paris Diderot Richard Breheny, University College London Abstract Many psycholinguistic studies have found that processing negative sentences is difficult, and often involves the representation of the positive argument. Current rejection accounts suggest that processing the positive argument is the mandatory first step of negation processing, and the difficulty of negation comes from the extra step of embedding. We argue for a dynamic pragmatic view, suggesting that even when processing a sentence without context, comprehenders retrieve contextual information such as its Question Under Discussion (QUD), using linguistic cues. Without supporting context, negation acts as a cue for retrieving and accommodating the most prominent QUD, where the truth of the positive counterpart is at issue. QUD accommodation happens incrementally and automatically, which triggers the representation of the positive argument and contributes to the extra processing cost related to negation. Keywords: negation, QUD, pragmatics, semantics, sentence processing Introduction In classical logic, negation has a simple semantic meaning: it changes the truth value of a proposition. If a proposition p is true, then the negation of p is false, and vice versa. By this analysis, propositions p and ¬p differ only in their truth values. However, in natural language, a negative sentence does not simply communicate the opposite of a positive sentence. Consider this example. There are streets in London with many small hotels. When you walk along such a street, you will see many hotel signs. If among these houses, you see a sign which says “this is not a hotel”, what will you think? This sign seems superfluous. We don’t put up signs to say what the house is not, as the list would have to be infinitely long. Upon seeing this sign, you do not just understand that the house is not a hotel, you also infer that many people have asked if it was a hotel or has mistaken it as one, and the sign is for people with such an assumption. How does negation allow us to infer such background information? What can this process tell us about the often cited difficulty with negation processing? This chapter addresses these two questions in four sections. First, we briefly