Negatiivissense

Negatiivissense is a term used in linguistic literature, particularly in Finnish studies, to denote the semantic sense that encodes negation in a word, phrase, or proposition. It refers to the meaning component that marks something as negative or opposite to a positive state. The concept is distinguished from negation as a syntactic or morpho-syntactic process; negation describes how a form or construction signals negation, while negativissense describes the resulting negative meaning itself.

In analysis, negativissense can be found in adjectives (for example, words that carry a negative evaluative sense), verbs, nouns, and in compounds or affixed forms that express opposition or absence. It can be realized morphologically through prefixes or suffixes, periphrastically through separate negation words, or through combination of both. The negative sense interacts with aspects such as scope (whether the negation applies to the whole proposition or only to a subpart), polarity, emphasis, and focus, influencing how negation is interpreted in discourse.

Typologically, researchers examine how different languages express negative sense and how this affects interpretation, including phenomena like negative concord, double negation, and the distribution of negative markers across parts of speech. The term is used to discuss how the lexical or bound meaning of a word contributes to overall interpretation, and how it relates to broader topics in semantics, such as antonymy, entailment, and sentiment.

See also: negation, polarity, antonymy, word sense, sentiment analysis.