Minus-reception - a literary reception, consisting in the absence in the text of one or another significant elements, the presence of which is expected by the reader. The essence of the negative technique is in pushing away from the modern text or from an earlier literary tradition. Therefore, for example, a free verse is a minus-trick when it occurs in national poetry against the background of the total dominance of sillabo tonics (as in Russia until the 1990s ), but it is not such in Anglo-American poetry of the second half of the 20th century , in which it is widespread enough so that the reader does not expect meter and rhyme from the text. Less often they talk about negative reception as a violation of readers' expectations, already formed within the text: in this sense, the negative reception will be, for example, a poem left without a rhyme (“blank”) in a rhymed poem.
The concept of negative reception and the term itself were introduced by Yu. M. Lotman as a particular realization in the field of poetics of the general semiotic principle of significant absence (cf., for example, zero inflection ).