36.1857, Confs: Exploring What is Not the Case – Methods for Investigating Negation (DGfS 2026 Workshop) (Germany)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-1857. Mon Jun 16 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.1857, Confs: Exploring What is Not the Case – Methods for Investigating Negation (DGfS 2026 Workshop) (Germany)

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Date: 14-Jun-2025
From: Merle Weicker [weicker at em.uni-frankfurt.de]
Subject: Exploring What is Not the Case – Methods for Investigating Negation (DGfS 2026 Workshop)


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: weicker at em.uni-frankfurt.de

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 weicker at em.uni-frankfurt.de
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



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