These are three of the questions that we investigate in our project on affixation within the CRC 1629 ‘Negation in Language and beyond’ (NegLab). We look at phenomena from Standard German (using empirical methods like picture matching tasks) and its earlier stages more closely (using corpus linguistic methods). One goal is to get a better understanding of why negative expressions have a higher processing load than non-negative ones.
Especially interesting are baseless negative derived adjectives (BNDAs). Check out one of our phenomena in French on Instagram [thanks to Cecilia Poletto]:
Le monde cruel des préfixes privatifs (by etymocurieux)
—
Weiß: Neg-words: what they are and what they are not and what follows from this. Published in Evolutionary Linguistic Theory [paper]
Meier: "Steigerung", lexicon entry for Wörterbuch zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft (WSK) Online, Band: Semantik und Pragmatik, edited by Daniel Gutzmann, Katharina Turgay and Ede Zimmermann, De Gruyter Brill. [link]
Reinert and Weicker: "Adjektiv", lexicon entry for Wörterbuch zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft (WSK) Online, Band: Semantik und Pragmatik, edited by Daniel Gutzmann, Katharina Turgay and Ede Zimmermann, De Gruyter Brill. [link]
Reinert, Weiß, Meier (accepted): Ohne Negation undenklich: Verbklassen und Adjektivmorphologie. Eine Untersuchung zur Systematik von negativen Adjektiven ohne positive Basis. Submitted for "Verbklassen", to appear as part of the series "Linguistik - Impulse und Tendenzen", de Gruyter.
Hammerla, Lücking, Reinert and Mehler: "D-Neg: Syntax-Aware Graph Reasoning for Negation Detection." Proceedings of 2025 International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing & Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (IJCNLP-AACL-Findings). [paper]