Introduction

The Meaning of Teachers’ Negations in Hong Kong Classrooms Interpreted from their Co-occurring Gestures

“…Horn (1989) suggests that this could be because affirmative sentences present facts about the world, while negative ones give facts about the affirmatives, operating on affirmative concepts by modifying them. In addition, the unmarked affirmative structure occurs more often than the negative and so it should be easier to process, if only by reason of frequency (Roitman, 2017). Nordmeyer and Frank (2015) further propose that difficulties in processing negation seem to occur particularly when the contextual information is missing, as might happen in a classroom with a nonnative audience.…”

“…Negation is considered a universal and unique feature of human language (Dahl, 2010), albeit a highly complex one (Roitman, 2017). There is little variation in the functions of negative particles across languages, which all share the same basic linguistic meaning of non-existence, rejection and denial (Roitman, 2017, p.1).…”