The focus of the seminar is on Negation. How explicit negation affects the representation in memory of negated concepts has been considered in recent empirical research into the discourse and cognitive functions of negation markers ('not' and 'no'). The consensus among contemporary psycholinguists is that a negation marker is an instruction from a speaker to an addressee to suppress the negated information. Accordingly, a negation marker reduces the levels of activation of the negated concepts to the extent that eventually they are no more accessible than irrelevant concepts and significantly less accessible than equivalent positive concepts. Folk wisdom, however, would have it otherwise. The belief here is that what is negated prevails, as the following exchange, taken from the Santa Barbara Spoken American Corpus, exemplifies:

1 P : … it was very clear. You know. ... She kept saying, ... prefacing everything with, .. you know, this is not a personal attack. .. This is not a personal vendetta,
B: Yeah, yeah yeah yeah. Right Right.
P: Which tells you, that it is.
B: Yeah.
P: That's immediately what it said. And that's what everybody perceived it.
B: Yeah.
(Taken from Du Bois et al., 2000, italics added.(

In the course we will look into studies investigating the various functions of negation and its effects on comprehension.