MegaNegRaising

Inferences that are triggered (at least in part) by particular lexical items provide a rich test bed for distinguishing the relative semantic contribution of lexical items and functional structure. One class of such inferences that has garnered extended attention is neg(ation)-raising, wherein negation on a predicate can be interpreted as though in that predicate’s subordinate clause. For example, a neg-raising inference is triggered by (1) while one is not triggered by (2).

1. Jo doesn’t think that Bo left. ⇝⇝ Jo thinks that Bo didn’t leave.

2. Jo doesn’t know that Bo left. ⇝/⇝ Jo knows that Bo didn’t leave.

The MegaNegRaising dataset (MegaNeRd) consists of slider-based veridicality judgments aimed at capturing patterns like that in (1) and (2) as well as ordinal acceptability judgments for 925 clause-embedding verbs of English with a variety of subordinate clause structures, matrix tenses, and matrix subjects. For a detailed description of the dataset, the item construction and collection methods, and discussion of how to use a dataset on this scale to address questions in linguistic theory, please see the references below.

Data

References

Researchers

Aaron Steven White

Hannah Youngeun An