Exploring What is Not the Case – Methods for Investigating Negation (DGfS 2026 Workshop)

Date: 25-Feb-2026 - 27-Feb-2026
Location: Trier, Germany
Contact: Merle Weicker
Contact Email: [email protected]

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Language Acquisition; Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics; Semantics

Submission Deadline: 15-Aug-2025

This short workshop (Kurz-AG) is organized as part of the 48th Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS 2026, https://www.uni-trier.de/universitaet/fachbereiche-faecher/fachbereich-ii/forschung-und-zentren/dgfs2026).

Workshop Description:
Negation is a universal property of human language that allows us to express and to reason about what is not the case. Although negation is a ubiquitous phenomenon, experimental investigation has repeatedly shown that negative sentences are more difficult to process and more difficult to elicit than affirmative ones. A second key finding is that contextual support can facilitate negation processing and can increase the likelihood of producing negation. Despite the substantial progress in empirical negation research, there are still unresolved questions. The workshop aims to address, but is not limited to, the following issues:

- Negation is a propositional operator that must be processed. A comparable operator is usually absent in affirmative sentences. Is their comparison appropriate? Are there structures that would be more suitable for comparison with negative sentences?
- Previous research has manipulated contextual features in several ways with mixed results. What exactly makes a context likely to trigger negation in production and ease negation in comprehension? What are specific contextual markers establishing pragmatic licensing of negation that should be systematically varied?
- What are requirements for specific methods (e.g., types of pictures used in visual world paradigms) or specific populations (e.g., children)?
- Do previous negation findings generalize to related phenomena such as cancellation or prohibition?
- Which role do prosodic features and nonverbal signals (e.g., a headshake) play in negation processing?
- (How) can large language models, which sometimes still have difficulties with negation, contribute to the experimental investigation of negation?

The primary goal of the workshop is to discuss challenges and best practices in empirical negation research in order to advance current methodologies used in this area. We particularly invite contributions from a processing, acquisition, and experimental linguistic perspective. The workshop may also be relevant for corpus or fieldwork research that addresses the above topics. We explicitly welcome contributions on languages beyond English.

Invited Speaker:
Elena Albu (Tübingen University)

Organizers: Merle Weicker (Goethe University Frankfurt), Carolin Dudschig (Tübingen University), Yvonne Portele (Goethe University Frankfurt, Freie Universität Berlin)

Submission Details:
We invite submissions for 30-minute talks (20 min. presentation + 10 min. discussion). The language of the workshop is English. Abstracts should be anonymous and must not exceed one page (A4, 12pt, 1-inch margins).
Please send your abstract in PDF format to [email protected] and include information about the author(s) in your email.

Important Dates:
Abstract submission deadline: August 15, 2025
Notification of acceptance: beginning of September 2025