Negation Usage in the Croatian Parliament

At the center of this research is an analysis of negation usage in the Croatian Parliament. Research shows that psychologically speaking, it is much harder to process a negative word followed by a positive adjective (e.g., he is not happy) than an adjective with a negative prefix (e.g., he is unhappy). We investigate how negation is used among Croatian politicians during parliamentary sessions and whether its usage is dependent on the speaker’s gender and party preference, but also the time when the session was held.Transcripts of the Croatian Parliament’s sessions have been available since 2003. Each transcript includes information on the date of the session, the speaker, and his/her party followed by the speech. We have made a selection of 4 points in time per each year since 2003 (January, May, September, December) for which the data exists in order to test if the time period of the session (just before and after the recess) has an impact on the usage of negation. This corpus is over 9 million tokens in size. Additionally, from this data, we were able to sort out different sub-corpora according to the gender of each speaker and their party.For this experiment, a syntactic grammar was designed to annotate different types of negation on the sentence level: (a) negative verb + positive adjective; (b) positive verb + negative adjective; and (c) negative verb + negative adjective.