(This article is reposted from my previous blog website.)
The meaning of sentence may means more than the words itself. We don’t know the meaning only on the words. Example — who says I am into you?
Let us take another example.
When a group of friends go to a picnic excluding Sam, Sam asked: “What was that?” A member in the group answered: “Yeah., sure. Of course, you would have gone.”
From this scenario, we can infer that Sam may have barely shown up to such an event. We can’t know this hint just by looking into this sentence — what was that?
That’s why when dealing with NLP, we need to know the speech act.
The following are some tests about negative sentences.
Hint: Don’t mix up between negative sentences and rhetorical questions.
- 我不喜欢姚明。
2. 我并没有喜欢姚明。
3. 我不讨厌赤犬。
4. 谁说我喜欢姚明。
Ans: The previous 3 sentences are negative sentences. However, the last one is rhetorical question.
A rhetorical question is one asked solely to produce an effect or to make an assertion, not to elicit a reply. — by How to Train Your Dragon.
