Researchers found that negating adjectives with "not" affects how our brains interpret their meaning, mitigating rather than inverting their definition.
Even for things within a single axis, like good vs. bad, it’s more complicated than it looks like. For example I’ve noticed plenty Brits using “not bad” to convey “really good”; while typically Americans would use it for “passable”. So you’re being spot on when you say that it is not the same as an inversion.
On logical grounds what happens there is instead exclusion - and then, which value you’ll take from the leftover will be heavily culture-dependent.
I believe that this should explain even the negation in non-IE languages like Japanese “nai”, Guaraní (n[d]- -[r]i circumfix).
How would you even invert an adjective that doesn’t exist on a one-dimensional scale?
At least in theory you’d invert all meaningful attributes. In some cases it doesn’t really make sense; just like you can’t invert a natural number. The negation = exclusion still does make sense in all of them.
Even for things within a single axis, like good vs. bad, it’s more complicated than it looks like. For example I’ve noticed plenty Brits using “not bad” to convey “really good”; while typically Americans would use it for “passable”. So you’re being spot on when you say that it is not the same as an inversion.
On logical grounds what happens there is instead exclusion - and then, which value you’ll take from the leftover will be heavily culture-dependent.
I believe that this should explain even the negation in non-IE languages like Japanese “nai”, Guaraní (n[d]- -[r]i circumfix).
At least in theory you’d invert all meaningful attributes. In some cases it doesn’t really make sense; just like you can’t invert a natural number. The negation = exclusion still does make sense in all of them.