A prosodic analysis will be carried out on 'not' negatives in different discourse settings. Negatives are both theoretically and practically important, since they critically influence the significance of an utterance. The difference between 'I can not do it myself.' and 'I can do it myself.' is one a listener must attend to, and respond to appropriately, so one may claim that the negative should be articulated prominently to be heard clearly. This claim, called here the Cognitive Prominence Principle, is supported by phonetic studies in which negatives were produced with pitch prominence in read sentences. Conflicting data come from other analysts who have shown that a Social Agreement Principle predisposes speakers to prefer agreement in conversation and minimize signs of disagreement. This results in speakers not emphasizing the critical negative information, undermining the Cognitive Prominence Principle in many interactive situations. Thus, the use of negatives provides a unique insight into contrasting cognitive and interactional principles. Close analysis of prosodic variation on negatives can enrich linguistic theory by determining the degree to which one of these principles dominates language use in a given situation, and the degree to which both must be taken into consideration. Analysis of 'not' negation also requires attention to specific sociolinguistic variables. The study will compare three specific social situations with contrasting relationships to social agreement: situations in which agreement is near mandatory will be compared with those in which it is dispreferred, and those in which it is presumed to be neutralized. Computer assisted acoustic analysis of debates, supportive conversations, and neutrally informational speech will permit a statistical multivariate analysis of both social and linguistic parameters, using prosodic prominence as the primary linguistic variable, and social situation and culture as sociolinguistic variables. The results will be of interest to both theoretical and applied linguists because they will address both theoretical and practical questions. Evidence for the influence of cultural and situational factors on what has been considered a 'purely linguistic' variant may alter the way linguistics will be done in the future. This evidence can later be utilized by those who wish to 'fine tune' speech recognition and synthesis algorithms for different social and interactive environments, and by those who teach others to communicate effectively in specific intercultural settings.
