Variable negative concord in Brazilian Portuguese

Chapter 3 investigated ways in which languages convey negation by means of an expression that corresponds to the first-order logic connective ¬. In English this would be not. Negation can also be attracted to other expressions in the sentence, particularly indefinites in argument or adjunct position (Section 1). Negative attraction creates negative indefinites. The class of negative indefinites includes both negative quantifiers (English nobody, nothing, nowhere, never) and n-words. Negative attraction is extended to multiple indefinites under negation in Section 2. Sentences involving a range of negative indefinites raise problems for the principle of compositionality of meaning, because some languages assign a double negation reading to such a sequence, and others a single negation reading. Chapter 1 argued that the compositionality problem cannot be solved in the lexicon, and exploited the polyadic quantifier analysis proposed by de Swart and Sag (2002) to offer a grammatical analysis. The argumentation is briefly summarized in Section 3, in preparation of the typology of double negation and negative concord languages. The polyadic quantifier analysis developed by de Swart and Sag (2002) works well for French because it displays ambiguities between single and double negation readings in sentences that combine two negative expressions. However, in most other languages there is a strong bias toward either the double negation or the negative concord reading. Section 4 builds a bidirectional optimality theory (OT) built on top of the polyadic quantifier analysis in order to account for the systematic contrast between negative concord and double negation languages. In negative concord languages, the functional motivation that favors marking of ‘negative variables’ in the syntax wins out. Double negation languages value first-order iteration in the semantics. Languages that display ambiguities have an overlapping range of constraints in a stochastic extension of the model developed in Chapter 6 (Section 3). As Section 4 emphasizes, the bidirectional setup is essential, for syntactic and semantic variation go hand in hand. Section 5 returns to the relation between negative concord and negative polarity, and offers a diachronic perspective while Section 6 concludes the chapter.

This paper investigates the status of Negative Concord Items (NCIs) in three so-called Strict Negative Concord (NC) languages (namely, Greek, Romanian, and Russian). An experimental study was designed to gather evidence concerning the speakers’ acceptability and interpretation of sequences with argumental NCIs in subject, object, and both positions whendhen/nu/newere not present. Our results show that NCIs are negative indefinites whose presence in a clausal domain is enough to assign a single negation reading to the whole sequence, thus arguing in support of the hypothesis that in NC structures the minimal semantic requirement to convey single negation is that one or more NCIs encoding a negative feature appear within a sentential domain. We argue that in these structuresdhen/nu/neare the instantiations of a negative feature [neg] disembodied from an indefinite negative NCI in order to obey a syntax–phonology interface constraint.

In this chapter, the analysis according to which negative indefinites have to be licensed by sentential negation is extended to languages without negative concord. This step is motivated by a phenomenon negative indefinites in German exhibit: In certain contexts, negative indefinites yield a split reading, where another operator takes scope in between the negative and the indefinite meaning component. This indicates that negation is not interpreted where it is marked morpho-syntactically. An analysis of negative indefinites in German is spelled out, including a detailed investigation of scope splitting in certain constructions (intensional verbs, predicative positions, topic-focus accent). This analysis is compared to other approaches to scope splitting proposed in the literature.

This paper is mainly concerned with two points: The first one is a better theoretical foundation of the interpretation of acceptability judgment tasks (AJTs) in studies on Brazilian Portuguese (BrP) bare nominals (BNs). I draw on Bader and Haussler’s (J Linguist 46(2):273–330, 2010) model, which is based on signal detection theory, and show that an (explicitly or implicitly) binary approach to AJTs on BrP BNs fails to capture the whole picture. This is exemplified by contrasting the two AJT studies on specific and definite BNs presented in this paper with other experimental approaches to BrP BNs. The second concern is the status of these rather marginal forms in BrP. It will be claimed that only an approach combining different empirical methods can give a sufficiently clear picture. In order to support this claim, a third experiment, namely an elicitation task, will be presented and discussed.

This paper proposes an analysis of the diachrony of negation in German. We suggest that despite the changes in the negation particle and the availability of negative concord (NC), there is a large amount of diachronic continuity both with respect to the syntax of negation in terms of NegP as well as to the semantic status and licensing requirements of the neg-markers. Notably, negative indefinites are licensed throughout the history of German by a covert negation operator in a one-to-one relation. The apparent diachronic continuity in the availability of NC in certain German dialects by contrast is argued to be only of a superficial nature: It is in fact due to diachronic change, as NC is not a homogeneous phenomenon.

Even though the entire variety of attested NC systems is fully learnable, formally, NC systems are more marked than DN systems. That gives rise to the question of why languages would exhibit NC in the first place, let alone display the rich variety of NC systems they do. A likely explanation is that NC patterns result from grammaticalization of negative markers. If new NMs arose in a language, or existing ones changed their nature, the conditions under which negative features could be acquired would have altered. This chapter shows how the variation among NC systems has emerged diachronically along the lines of Jespersen’s Cycle. It also discusses how the emergence of negative indefinites (NIs) / neg-words, as well as the exclusion of their universal counterparts, can be accounted for. This also provides a solution for the nall problem: the fact that no language in the world lexicalizes negated universal quantifiers.

Im vorliegenden Artikel wird anhand eines spontansprachlichen Korpus bilingualer Sprecher ein sprachliches Phänomen im brasilianischen Hunsrückischen genauer betrachtet: die Negation. Die Negation ist insofern linguistisch interessant, als sie in den beiden involvierten Kontaktvarietäten (deutsche Minderheitensprache, brasilianisches Portugiesisch (BP)) unterschiedlich ausgeprägt ist. Von Interesse ist insbesondere die Stellung des Negationswortes in Hinblick auf das finite Verb und das direkte Objekt sowie die Frage, ob zwei Negationselemente in einem Satz vorkommen können, ohne dass die negative Interpretation des Satzes sich in eine Affirmation wandelt (Negative Concord). Ziel der Analyse ist es, mögliche Sprachkontaktphänomene und sprachkontaktbedingten Wandel zu identifizieren. Es wird geschlussfolgert, dass die Negation im Hunsrückischen sehr stabil ist und deutschen Wortstellungsmustern folgt. Diese grammatische Stabilität beruht auf dem regelmäßigen Gebrauch des Dialekts. Dennoch finden sich wie im BP Phänomene von Negative Concord, das im Standarddeutschen nicht in gleicher Weise möglich ist. Im Gegensatz zum brasilianischen Portugiesischen handelt es sich allerdings nicht um ein kategorisches, sondern um ein variables Phänomen, das in ähnlicher Weise in anderen deutschen Dialekten existiert bzw. existierte.

Recent research demonstrates that prototypical negative concord (NC) languages allow double negation (DN) (Espinal & Prieto 2011; Prieto et al. 2013; Déprez et al. 2015; Espinal et al. 2016). In NC, two or more syntactic negations yield a single semantic one (e.g., the ‘I ate nothing’ reading of “I didn’t eat nothing”), and in DN each negation contributes to the semantics (e.g. ‘It is not the case that I ate nothing’). That NC and DN have been shown to coexist calls into question the hypothesis that grammars are either NC or DN (Zeijlstra 2004), and supports micro-parametric views of these phenomena (Déprez 2011; Blanchette 2017). Our study informs this debate with new experimental data from American English. We explore the role of syntax and speaker intent in shaping the perception and interpretation of English sentences with two negatives. Our results demonstrate that, like in prototypical NC languages (Espinal et al. 2016), English speakers reliably exploit syntactic, pragmatic, and acoustic cues to in selecting an NC or a DN interpretation.

In many Romance languages, negative expressions exhibit a robust distributional asymmetry.When in post-verbal positions, they require theco-presence of negation; when in pre-verbal positions,they are incompatible with it. In the same languages, bare nominals exhibit a distribution that parallels the negativeone in some striking respects. They are possible in post-verbal positions, but infelicitous as pre-verbal subjects. Similar distributionalparallelisms between these expressions are shown toobtain cross-linguistically and diachronically and are argued to derive from their common internal syntactic and semantics properties. Both expressions have a 'deficient' DP, lack quantificational force, and are unable to check the D feature of EPP. Bare nominals may lack D0, but negative expressions contain a null D0syntactically licensed under DP internal Spec Headagreement or head movement. As these operations result from parametricoptions in DP syntax and have consequences on the semantic nature of these expressions, the central result of the paper isto derive cross-linguistic variations in negative concord from independentchoices in DP syntax.

Hickey (2005) has argued that there are three social varieties of Dublin English (‘Local’, ‘Mainstream’ and ‘New Dublin’) and that younger females are key players in the shift towards the ‘New Dublin’ type. With a view to further investigating some aspects of Hickey’s proposals, this article reports on a pilot project that focused on native Dubliners whose working class origins would place them at the ‘Local’ end of Hickey’s continuum. It investigated responses to perception and production tests on morphosyntactic and phonological variables amongst two generations of males and females. Interestingly, speaker judgments on stereotypical southern Irish-English features, in particular, did not uncover the significant gender and generational differences which Hickey (2005) finds evidence for amongst his young female subjects. Keywords: Dublin English; pronominalisation; agreement; complementation; rhoticity; dentality; acceptability judgement

In this paper I argue that the set of formal features that can head a functional projection is not predetermined by UG but derived through L1 acquisition. I formulate a hypothesis that says that every functional category F is realised as a semantic feature [F] unless there are overt doubling effects in the L1 input with respect to F; this feature is then analysed as a formal feature [i/uF]. In the first part of the paper I provide a theoretical motivation for this hypothesis, in the second part I test this proposal with a case study, namely the cross-linguistic distribution of Negative Concord (NC). I demonstrate that in NC languages negation must be analysed as a formal feature [i/uNEG], whereas in Double Negation languages this feature remains a semantic feature [NEG] (always interpreted as a negative operator), thus paving the way for an explanation of NC in terms of syntactic agreement. In the third part I argue that the application of the hypothesis to the phenomenon of negation yields two predictions that can be tested empirically. First I demonstrate how this hypothesis predicts negative markers Neg° can be available only in NC languages; second, independent change of the syntactic status of negative markers, can invoke a change with respect to the exhibition of NC in a particular language. Both predictions are proven to be correct. I finally argue what the consequences of the proposal presented in this paper are for both the syntactic structure of the clause and second for the way parameters are associated to lexical items.

This paper presents a novel account for the optionality of negative concord observed withneither...norcoordinations, in an otherwise strict negative concord language—Turkish. I argue that the apparently optional negative concord is a surface phenomenon that can be traced back to a structural ambiguity arising from the type-flexibility of coordination operators. The semantic type of the coordination affects its syntactic position relative to the Turkish NegP, which results in different surface facts: whenever theneither...norcoordination is of a generalized quantifier type, it originates in the vP below the NegP, akin to other negative concord items likenobody, triggering negative concord with sentential negation; whenever it is a propositional coordination, it contains the NegP position, and there is no negative concord. We can account for this exceptionally optional negative concord phenomenon by seamlessly importing these facts into an existing negative concord architecture (Zeijlstra 2004, 2012), with no significant modifications. This reductionist analysis contrasts with alternative approaches that explain optionality by adding complexity to the mechanics of the negative concord system (Şener and İşsever 2003 for Turkish; Szabolcsi 2018a for Hungarian). Finally, this account crucially relies on a theory of coordination operators as type-flexible, and therefore contributes an argument against a view of coordinators as having a rigid propositional type (Hirsch 2017; Schein 2017).

The paper investigates the behavior of Bare Singulars (BS) and Bare Mass (BM) nouns in Brazilian Portuguese (BrP) in two acceptability experiments. The traditional view on the BS (Munn & Schmitt, 2005) argues that its syntax and semantics differs from that of BM nouns, because they behave differently when combined with predicates of individuation, reflexives and reciprocals. Individuating predicates select for atomic individuals, and mass nouns do not denote atoms in a semi-lattice structure, is the explanation. Relying on Basso (2007), two experiments were conducted to verify the hypothesis predicted by the traditional view. Behind our enterprise is the intuition that BS are in some sense massive (Camacho & Pezatti, 1996). The experiments were applied to 200 speakers. The predictions of the traditional view are not fulfilled: BM nouns are acceptable by more than a half of the speakers, and some BS sentences are unacceptable. The second experiment evaluated whether the distribution of acceptability was due to natural atomicity (Rothstein, 2008). Although there seems to be some influence, the results are not conclusive.

Negation is a topic that has received considerable attention ever since the early days of sign language linguistics; also, it is one of the grammatical domains that has given the impetus for sign language typology. In this paper, we offer a typological and theoretical contribution to the study of sign language negation. As for the typological side, we add Georgian Sign Language (GESL) to the pool of languages investigated. Our description reveals that GESL displays a number of typologically unusual features: a considerable number of negative particles, including emphatic, prohibitive, and tense-specific particles; specialized negative modals; and a wide range of possibilities for Negative Concord (NC) involving two manual negative signs, including a unique tense-specific instance of NC. Most of the patterns we report—available negative particles, their clausal position, and NC possibilities—are clearly different from those attested in spoken Georgian. As for the theoretical contribution, we investigate how the highly complex GESL negation system compares to existing taxonomies of NC and Double Negation systems, and we conclude that GESL aligns with certain languages that have been classified as atypical NC languages.

This paper aims at showing that Capeverdean, a Portuguese-based Creole, is a strict Negative Concord language. In fact, n-words (Laka 1990) like ningen ‘no.one’ and nada ‘nothing’ always co-occur with sentential negation, be they in preverbal or postverbal position. This means that they are prohibited in all non-negative clauses, including modal contexts. Syntactically, they show a behavior typical of weak Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) as described in Martins (2000). Following Giannakidou (2002), I propose that, semantically, these n-words are universal quantifiers with no intrinsic negative meaning. Finally, I briefly address the adverbs tioxi and nunka, which roughly mean ‘never’: the former is also a weak NPI but not a quantifier, the latter may be ambiguous between a strong and a weak NPI, and seems a quantifier.