Negations in Speech as a Marker of Describing Emotional Negative Stimuli

The article presents the results of an empirical study of the oral corpus of texts. Based on some theoretical and empirical data, we have suggested that negations in speech can be markers of describing emotionally negative stimuli, the experiments have allowed us to test this hypothesis. The Study 1 (N=42): subjects described two pictures that are opposite in their emotional characteristics (positive and negative). The Study 2 (N=32): subjects had to tell two memories about themselves: a frightening memory and a joyful one. The recorded audios were transcribed into written form. It was made by the system of phrase allocation (or elementary discursive units). So, we’ve got corpus of oral text. The corpus was analyzed by the presence of negations in it (particles and prefixes "not", the word "no"). Statistical analysis showed that frightening memories and an emotionally negative picture are described significantly more often with the use of negative particles (p≤0.001). Describing negative stimuli, negations were used twice as often as when describing positive ones. So, it can be assumed that the description of emotionally negative stimuli actualizes the use of negative phrases in speech. Such results allow us to consider negations as an implicit discursive marker, which indicates the negative emotional nature of the subject of speech.

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