Lexical Negation in Czech Initial Education–Negative Imperatives from the Teacher's Mouth

The cognitive psychology research state the direct relationship between thinking and other cognitive processes. Change to positive thinking influences change toward experiencing positive emotions, positive interpretation of events, evocation of positive memories. External manifestation of thinking is speech. We start from the position of positive psychology and ask the following question: Do we speak positively? It is really difficult to reliably answer, therefore a procedure by Carl Raimund Popper was chosen, based on the evidence in the form of falsification, and we formulated hypothesis: we speak negatively unnecessarily. This paper focuses on the exposure of lexical negative verbs in the teachers’ speech. A frequency analysis of the Czech National Corpus SCHOLA2010 was done. Corpus contains transcript of spoken language from 204 lessons of Czech initial education (representative selection). There were 9377 lexical negative verbs identified, 409 of them in the form of imperative. Top ten imperatives are: do not worry (49 occurrences), do not forget (44), do not say (26), do not write (24), do not talk (13), do not do (12), do not be naughty (9), do not be (8), do not pack (6), do not give (6). All founded imperatives can be (from a lexical point of view) positively reformulated, while maintaining the meaning) positively reformulated.ConclusionAnalysis of teaching process in initial education in the Czech Republic in terms of lexically negative imperative verbs, suggests that Czech teachers do use negative imperatives unnecessarily. The article discusses some of the psychological consequences of these findings.