A Cognitive Approach to Double Negation in Persian

Abstract

The purpose of the present study is to investigate double negation in Persian in the framework of Cognitive linguistics and based on the theory of mental spaces. Negation is one of the most important cognitive, intellectual and linguistic categories in the human mind, which is manifested in different languages of the world in different ways. This category is also manifested in Persian by various negative elements and structures that generally can be divided into two categories: single (simple) negation and multiple negation. The research data consists of 921 Persian sentences extracted from the social network of Instagram. The results of data analysis show that each double negation sentence, in addition to its own mental space, evokes the mental space of the positive sentence and sometimes the mental space of the corresponding single negative sentence. Understanding the meaning of double negation depends on the formation of these mental spaces and the creation of conceptual maps between them based on the three cognitive processes of understatement, intensification and semantic neutralization.

Keywords

• negation
• double negation
• mental space
• cognitive linguistics
• negative polarity